Dodo Au Go-Go

I woke up at 4.43am. It's getting to be a regular pattern these days, with Little One and all. I could go back to sleep, and sometimes I do. And other times, I check the time on my phone - and a torrent of world stuff rushes in, too seething, jumbled and anxiety-inducing to ignore. On those days, sleep slips out of reach. It washes away in the flood of stuff, or just retreats into the night. "Sommeil casse" as they say in Mauritius. "My sleep broke". It sounds more lyrical in Kreol/French. Like tiny pieces of sleep crumbling and breaking away until you reach a state of wakefulness.  I head towards the kitchen. A lizard laughs, languid. Indi-Girl, my beloved woofer, stirs and gives me the once-over, and goes back to sleep. I like to think she's checking to make sure I'm ok. She could just as easily be checking to see why I'm disturbing her sleep. But I'll take my interpretation with a single-shoulder shrug and a smile.  I make a cup of te...

Over on Twitter, I'm playing along to a daily March indie-writer celebration, called #MarchOfTheWriters, initiated by the very awesome JD Estrada . The Day 7 prompt was #HomeIs So. I'm a migrant. I'm a member of a diaspora (probably more than one). If anyone asks, I claim a formal hyphenated identity that includes three places and two hyphens. Roots and routes have been a feature of my life journey, and of the stories I tell about myself. All these things have been part of the reason I wrote a doctoral thesis over an excrutiatingly long period of time (and the doctorate is also the reason I've developed an overly complicated relationship to writing, but that's another post for another time). In short, I've thought about the idea of 'Home' a lot. I was born in Country A. I left there as a toddler and haven't been back, though I still claim citizenship there. It's not home, but it's my father's home, and my parents' stories come t...