In the late days of winter, when the light begins to retreat, my body begins its annual revolt.
I don’t mean anything dramatic; no illnesses, nothing my doctor would write down. It’s more like an inherited panic, an ancestral confusion. My body was shaped for heat and dry horizons, not for trembling at some Dunedin bus stop while the rain bites down. Sometimes, I imagine my bloodstream saying We are not meant for this. Which, to be fair, is reasonable. My family line spent centuries in the heat. Now, here I am, trying to convince my cells to cooperate with wind so sharp it feels like it has teeth. Cold always negotiates with bone.
A few mornings ago, I stood in the bathroom waiting for the shower to heat up, rubbing my arms as though that would coax warmth out of them. I watched myself in the mirror, hair gathered like storm clouds and skin a little grey from tiredness, and thought My body has been loyal beyond reason. It has adapted to migrations, airports, and new grocery stores with unfamiliar brands of milk. It has memorised the topography of many different countries and forgotten none of them. When the cold arrives, it panics as though betrayed.
While I lathered shampoo in my hair, I remembered something my mother once told me: that my curls are a protective response to the sun. I thought of this as water streamed down and made my curls cling to my temples. They’ve become less shield and more sponge, gathering droplets until I have to squeeze them out like soaked fabric. Evolution improvises, but not quickly enough for the pace that immigration demands.
I marvel at how my body carries knowledge I never consciously learned. When I flinch from a loud noise or turn my face toward a sudden warmth, I realise these are inheritances, not habits. My father once told me that the body stores everything. I used to think he was being poetic. Now I know he was simply telling the truth in the only language he had left. When I reach for warmth with such urgency, it isn’t just because I’m cold; it’s because somewhere in my lineage, someone endured winter without firewood, and my body hasn’t forgotten.
The wind on Albany Street knows exactly where to find bone. When I’m walking up it—my fingers frozen and my shoulders tight—I imagine all my ancestors gathered, watching me from somewhere unseen, and saying gently but with disappointment: “We gave you so much sun. How did you end up here?”
It’s strange, the negotiations we make with ourselves in order to belong to a place. I’ve been learning the cloud patterns religiously. I find it fascinating the way people say ‘crisp’ instead of ‘cold’; the way everyone pretends the rain is not that bad, as though complaining would make them ungrateful citizens. I mimic these behaviours just to see if they fit, but there are days when I cannot pretend. Days when the cold is a border I cannot cross. Yet I still hope the wind mistakes me for someone accustomed to it. You can only learn belonging by surviving it.
I’ve been thinking about the word ‘adjustment’. People use it casually, as though adjusting was just like shifting furniture around a room. Adjustment for me is a suturing of selves. The child who grew up under one sun must coexist with the adult learning to survive under another. The woman I’m trying to become must negotiate with the girl I once was. It feels like translating a life into another language and hoping nothing essential is lost.
Although the other day, I caught myself feeling proud after correctly predicting the corner of Dunedin that gets the coldest at dusk. Such a tiny accomplishment. My mother laughs when she sees how seriously I take these victories: memorising bus routes, recognising the cafés that stay open past two, learning which aisle in the supermarket hides the brand of noodles closest to the one she makes. If exile is a wound, then domestic rituals are the sloppy but necessary stitches.
My body’s confusion doesn’t end with the weather.
The steam in the bathroom thickens. I closed my eyes. For weeks, I’ve been having this recurring dream in which I accidentally eat something that could send me to the hospital. Every time I wake up with the same sinking feeling; even in my subconscious, I can’t trust myself to protect myself. The ease with which I slip out of my own care frightens me.
I told a friend about this—half-embarrassed, half-hoping she would interpret it for me. She didn’t hesitate.
“This makes perfect sense for you. You hate being overlooked, even by yourself.”
She said it kindly, but it stung, probably because it was true.
Another friend later joked that I have the spiritual biography of a middle child, even though I’m not one. I don’t know what that means exactly, but something in me recognised the accusation. Neglect has always made me flinch more than confrontation ever could. Being hurt because someone didn’t notice? That bruises a part of me that never learned to toughen.
I’ve always believed that noticing is a form of devotion. I rely on it. I love people through the tiny archives I keep of them: the sound a friend makes when she suppresses laughter, the way another always picks the red M&Ms first, the exact coffee order of someone to whom I’m no longer speaking. My brain is chaotic in almost all domains except for love, where it becomes suddenly precise.
Self-care for me is mostly administrative: alarms set for future versions of myself who will forget what the current me knows, Sundays blocked out for rest because I cannot be trusted to stop without instruction, reminders on my phone. I call it practicality, but really it is a promise: I will not abandon myself through inattention.
Except lately, my attention malfunctions in one area—my writing. Writing has always been the closest thing I have to a homeland, which might be why returning to it feels perilous. There is no pattern to writing I can predict. I’ll set aside entire days to write and end them with nothing to show but a mug of cold tea and irritation. Then, on a random Tuesday at 2.40 am, lightning hits. Lines arrive urgently, like passengers late for boarding. I scramble for my phone in the dark, typing half-blind, feeling both cursed and chosen.
Someone once told me that writing is paying attention to your own attention. If so, then mine is a delinquent teenager: moody, nocturnal, impossible to reason with.
I think a part of why I’ve been avoiding writing is that I know where it will lead me. No matter what I begin with—weather, food, dreams—eventually the sentence bends towards homesickness. It is the desire beneath all other desires. It is embarrassing, sometimes, how predictable I am to myself.
Whenever I read old poetry or listen to songs from home, I feel like someone is narrating my interior monologue with more elegance. The metaphors collapse into one another: beloved, land, mother, self. They’re interchangeable; four versions of the same ache. I keep thinking everything I feel has already been articulated by someone in a village that my ancestors fled, long before I was born.
I worry that all my writing is derivative because longing has a limited vocabulary. The same themes circle back: gratitude that tastes like mourning, love that grows from scar tissue, ancient yearning inherited. Nothing is new. Every personal loss resurrects a historical one. A breakup mimics the same displacement. Winter reminds me of exile. Even small disappointments refract back to the foundational wound, the split that occurred the moment my family first stepped away from home.
Sometimes I think I want to return. Other times, I realise I want something impossible—to go home to a version of home that no longer exists. I want a portal. A loophole. Time travel that deposits me in a past when nothing has yet been taken.
Is there a word for longing for something irretrievable? I suppose that is grief, but grief feels too static. What I feel still writhes. It negotiates.
Living here often feels like acting in a play with the wrong script. Everything is structurally fine—the city, friends, routines—but something in me remains unconvinced and restless. The theatre lights are too bright, my moves feel performative, my body refuses to accept this as the primary reality.
When I’m overwhelmed, I try to romanticise it. Difficulty, I tell myself, invites grandeur. If life were frictionless, we’d never learn what we’re capable of insisting on. Hardship becomes an opportunity for devotion. I often think about declarations of love in old songs: the “I will cross oceans barefoot” type, the “Distance cannot compete” variety. Those lyrics used to embarrass me in their certainty of devotion. Now I understand they are a miracle.
I think of all the people who have chosen me in difficult circumstances: friends who learned to pronounce my name correctly on the first try; family who tracked my time zones; people who aren’t quite friends, strangers, or foes who understood that sometimes I disappear—not because I want to, but because displacement makes ghosts out of all of us.
It’s funny how much of my life has been shaped by weather. There were years defined by drought when nothing grew. Seasons of overwhelming monsoon, where every feeling arrived at once and flooded everything. Now, I seem to be living through a long but clarifying winter. Winter teaches you to strip down to essentials. To identify what warmth is worth keeping. To discern which memories are coats and which are cold. Maybe that’s why I keep returning to the idea that endurance is a form of love, a promise to a future self to survive so they don’t have to.
A friend recently told me the way I speak about home sounds like prayer. I didn’t know what to say. Prayers usually ask for intervention, mercy, or transformation. I suppose I am asking for all of those things when I speak about home, but also for recognition; a place to acknowledge me as its own, even after years of absence. Home, in my mind, is both a destination and an apology I’ve been waiting to receive. I don’t know if either exists.
I hold both close, the way one might hold warm stones in winter—not because they solve anything but because they comfort the hands that carry them. Maybe that’s the truth beneath everything I write—the desire to be held by something larger than circumstance.
I keep longing for alignment, a moment when both my body and the world around me agree on what the temperature should be. For now, that agreement is theoretical, but hope—like noticing—is a form of devotion. I practise both imperfectly but earnestly. Each day, I try again to believe I am not just surviving the sky but learning to interpret it. That somewhere between longing and adaptation, between grief and gratitude, there exists a version of myself who feels whole.
I wish, sometimes, for a life that doesn’t ask me to negotiate my belonging every morning. However, I also know that if things remain complicated, love will still be a compass.
As the shower cools, I stand still, letting water run down my back, feeling the air chill my wet shoulders. It strikes me again how tender it is that the body never stops trying to adapt. Despite confusion, panic, memory, and fear, it attempts survival with the enthusiasm of a child learning to walk. Maybe that’s all any of us are doing: improvising evolutions we didn’t ask for. Trying to remain warm in climates that surprise us. Trying to keep promises to ourselves that we sometimes forget we made. Trying, despite everything, to choose love in a world that keeps making it complicated.
I step out of the shower, shivering but grateful for the way the cold sharpens everything. For the way longing makes me remember who I am. For the odd romance of endurance. For the stubborn, ridiculous, and miraculous certainty that love will always find its way home, even when I no longer know which direction that is.
If I ever find my future self, I suspect she will be standing somewhere warm. I will keep walking through these shifting seasons. Weathering is a choice; a refusal to surrender. Maybe that is what I am; someone who has learned to endure meaningfully. To love stubbornly. To remain, against all odds, warmed by the thought that somewhere, home is still possible.