The Art of Leaving

I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance.

I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind

Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.

Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different.

Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it.