Mariam Q comes back with a brand new peice for our July theme “Belonging” We hope you enjoy it ^^

Belonging, to a place, to a person or to an object. This feeling that you fit somewhere in the scattered pieces that made up the map. No matter how small the piece was, you still belonged to something. You held onto a thin thread, for if you let go, all meaning ceased to exist. We lived in our own bubbles, rarely did we leave to explore the world outside.

The world outside sometimes burst our bubbles to shove in our faces the cruel reality that some people were living. They would sleep at night not knowing if it was their last breathe, not knowing if they’ll wake up tomorrow. They stopped belonging to the ground underneath their bloodied feet, the ground that they were raised upon. The damaged roof over their heads stopped being a home. The place was alien to them, foreign and mutated beyond recognition.

They’ll rise up every morning, their voices harmonising with the song of freedom. They never backed down, fighting with every fibre in their bodies. Fighting to bring back their land, their home and their places. They want to bring what once belonged to them back.

Then we crawl back into our own bubbles, trying to erase those people’s suffering from our own head. The world pushed us around, showed us the worst that could happen just so we sit back and appreciate our lives. To know that we belong, we exist and that we matter was vital. Every human being deserved to belong to something, anything..to mean something to the world…

Author: Mariam Q