Author’s Note

Some people grow up knowing exactly where they belong.
Others grow up carrying a quiet sense of elsewhere—something felt long before it’s understood.

This piece traces that feeling as it moved through me over time: the early moments of disconnection, the private planning, the slow patience of a dream that never burned out. It isn’t about leaving a place as much as it is about realizing that orientation matters more than arrival.

Not all rebellions are loud.
Some of them are lived quietly, for years, while you learn how to wait without letting the dream die.

Still Tilting Elsewhere
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I find myself
drifting through my thoughts,
not lost this time.

I remember fourteen.
Hi Hi Puffy—
Ami and Yumi on the screen,
seeing Tokyo streets,
thinking “I hate this place.”
It was the first time
I felt the disconnect.

Suddenly,
I was hyperaware—
I didn’t belong here.

I remember fifteen.
The first time
I started planning.
The first time
I dreamed of jet engines,
of taking off,
making escape.

I remember sixteen.
Started speaking,
manifesting—
wishing it into existence.
I remember seventeen,
when my dream,
became a quiet rebellion.

And I was
only becoming
more aware,
I didn’t belong here.

I remember eighteen.
Applying for a job,
I knew I wouldn’t get.
Simply for the chance to split.
It was more about the “what if’s,”
what if they saw something—
what if they took a chance?

And then—
found family
from the Philippines.
Two girls of thirteen,
they became like nieces to me.
They were the spark
that stoked the ember,
that would simmer
just beneath the surface.

It’s been
eighteen years
since then.

Eighteen years,
and the ember never cooled.
It lived in the quiet places—
behind decisions,
beneath routines,
inside every map I drew
that didn’t include here.

And the dream didn’t fade.
It learned patience.
It learned silence.
It learned to wait
without dying.

Now,
I feel the shift again—
the same quiet pull,
the same soft rebellion,
older now,
but no less certain.

I still carry that fourteen-year-old
like a compass in my chest.
I carry that seventeen-year-old
like a promise I haven’t kept yet.
I’ve grown,
but the compass never changed.
Every version of me
still tilts toward somewhere…
else.

If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]