Everyone sees the blood.

Ancestral grief, responsibility, and belonging in the homeland.

URTH - MORE THAN ANYTHING [BTS]

I come from a place you can’t leave, no matter how far you try to go. The blood-soaked threads of generational misfortune tightly braid you to your kin in a mangled tapestry of flesh and viscera.

The roots of olive trees wrap their tendrils around your ankles and the lake's current incessantly washes you back ashore each time you try and wade away from the land. By duty more than by choice, the universal lottery has assigned you with the weight of a suffering ancestry, rested squarely on your barren back.

Your very existence is punctuated by responsibility. You are to fertilize the soil that grew the pomegranates your mother hand squeezed for you, thick streams of red nectar snaking down her forearms as an ode to her labour.

You owe to trail your fingers along bullet-riddled walls, memorize the ebb and flow of stone in the back alleys, respect the battered membrane that secured your right to life generations before your conception.

When you’re sat and a mother stands, you ought to forfeit your comfort. For after the price each and every mother paid for you to see this day, a passing moment of relief on a rusted subway wagon is the least one could ask for.

When scolded, you ought to turn the other cheek. Fleeting anger could never live up to the wailing grief of the land you only catch glimpses of every time the draft through the rotten window frame is too strong. You ought to not mourn the past too much, for there’s more loss in store for you tomorrow.

Romantic masochism.

Akif Aliyev - Personal Photography [Baku, 2024]

This is shibari with barbed wire, and you ought to not struggle. Fighting the hold will only carve your flesh, branding you with the motifs and impressions you’ve seen on heirloom pottery and carpets, frocks and leather-bound book covers. The same age-old story we’ve all been told; acceptance will hurt you less.

Even today, thousands of miles away, I still trail droplets of crimson blood behind me with every step I take. I sputter blood onto the chins and necks of everyone I speak to and leave grisly smears of red fingerprints on everything I touch.

Those I love are never clean. They’re constantly wiping away at the maroon specks dotting their skin, kindly masking their repulsion as the necessary price to pay for our companionship.

I come from a place that I ought to take with me everywhere I go. Far less like a nagging little sibling, and far more like an elder whom I owe a lifetime’s worth of reparations. For what exactly? I hardly know. I’m battered, beaten, and bruised inside and out, but at least I belong. That alone is worth everything.

Water mixed with soil makes mud.

Blood mixed with soil makes a homeland.