Author’s Note

There are places we inhabit physically, and then there are places we inhabit in our minds and hearts. Sometimes, those places are separated by thousands of miles and several hours on the clock.

This poem explores what it feels like when your life becomes divided between two places. Your body follows one time zone, but your thoughts, attention, and daily rhythms begin following another. You check the weather somewhere else before checking your own. You follow storms across oceans you’ve never crossed. You become invested in the ordinary happenings of a country that, physically speaking, you’ve never called home.

And yet, the connection is real.

There’s a particular kind of displacement in feeling more familiar with what’s happening somewhere far away than with what’s happening just outside your own window. It isn’t necessarily about wanting to abandon the place where you are. It’s about discovering that your sense of belonging doesn’t always respect borders, geography, or time zones.

The Tagalog phrase isip sa silangan means “mind in the east.” For me, it captures the heart of this piece: the body can remain in the west while the mind travels east, and somewhere between those two places, the heart finds its own way of existing.

This isn’t a poem about being unable to choose where you belong. It’s about recognizing that belonging doesn’t always require choosing just one place.

Sometimes, we exist between them.

And sometimes, that’s where the heart makes its home.

— Rowan Evans

Where the Heart Exists Between
Poetry by Rowan Evans‌

Feels like 4 in the morning,
yet it’s noon for me—
say that’s no way to live my life,
well, that’s news to me.

Do you know what it’s like—
the mind has immigrated,
your body is left in your old life?

I check the weather there
before I check mine.
I know what’s going on there,
more than I know what’s going on outside.

I’ve tracked storms across seas
that I’ve never seen—
saying prayers for a country
in which I’ve never been—

because I exist split,
here and there—
I exist between them.

Noon is four,
one is five,
and two is six,
this is the way I exist—

body in the west,
isip sa silangan—
and the heart exists between.

Journey into the Hexverse

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