Home as a sound: Carrying where I am from
I was not born here. Now I live here and my life feels like it has just begun. Studying at University of Toronto has been the beginning of a life so brutal yet so hopeful.
Picture from my home Kenya, a tea plantation narrating the story of how I grew up (Photo Credits: Rosa Maina // The Underground).
My long commute to UTSC is often quiet. Stillness. Conversations turning into blurred chatter, the bus engine humming beneath everything and outside the windows the city moves in grey. Every morning I reach for my headphones before I even lock my door. It's become instinctual. The moment music begins, everything in me settles.
Sometimes it is a song I play to forget my childhood existed. Sometimes I try to remember the same childhood in a song my mother played on a Sunday morning. Other times it is a melody in a language that does not belong to this city but still belongs to me. The memories arrive as soon as the song begins, the feeling is immediate, warm, nostalgic, painful. For a moment, the world becomes one, connecting where I am to where I began.
I was not born here. Now I live here and my life feels like it has just begun. Studying at University of Toronto has been the beginning of a life so brutal yet so hopeful — a manifestation of everything I was warned about. At school, I have learned how to adjust the way I speak and the way I react to unfamiliar things. But, at home, I slip back into something older, something inherited. It often feels like I am existing in two worlds at once and now as time passes the more I feel like I belong to neither. Music. This was the one space that did not encourage me to choose. In my house back in Kenya, songs played all the time.
My family home in Kenya, that has now become a place where we all come together (Photo Credits: Rosa Maina // The Underground).
Music often brought people together to share in the joy of dance. Songs filling the quiet, after long months spent in boarding school. Music turned ordinary evenings into something alive, a feeling almost tangible. I did not always understand the lyrics to the songs my mother played when I was younger, but I understood every emotion. I understood that these songs carried stories that existed long before me. When I listen to them now, I am reminded that identity is not something I have to build, it is something I carry.
UTSC is a commuter campus that is defined by movement. Students arrive at their bus stops and their parking spots, attend lectures and hurry to leave, especially in winter. Amidst all the moving there are fewer moments of stillness, only recognizable to students who intend to slow down. As I looked for these moments, I realized community does exist but it often feels out of reach, dispersed across classrooms, study halls, and commute routes. In this constant motion, headphones become more than an accessory. They become a space of continuity, of pattern.
More images of the farm back home were stories of my childhood are intertwined within the leaves (Photo Credits: Rosa Maina // The Underground).
Walking between buildings, I notice how students always have their headphones in their ears. Each of us is carrying a world that can only be personally experienced. For many students who were not born here, or were raised in homes shaped by an entirely different world, that personal sound can feel like a bridge.
There are days when campus feels heavy, with deadlines coming in, winter stretching long, and the feeling of being in survival mode resurfacing unexpectedly. On days like those, I return to the same songs. Not because they solve anything, but because they remind me of a version that existed before expectations. They remind me of a home that was so warm. Songs from where I started dreaming remind me that home can be sensory, it can be remembered and it can be carried.
Home I have realised is not always a place to return to, or somewhere I belong. Sometimes it is something that you press play on and it meets you exactly where you are.
