The Conceptual Promised Land
They say home is where your heart is. What if your heart is divided, I ask myself? Poor heart, it only has memories and people it cherishes. I wonder, when it’s divided like that, pushed and pulled and dragged behind us along with the suitcase, does that mean we can have more places to call home? If someone asked me, human beings are sometimes forced to pack their home like snails, cover it really well like a precious object in layers of cotton and wool so it wouldn’t shatter, because a glue that could fix this kind of broken pieces hasn’t been yet invented.
My story begins with a blond-haired, blue-eyed German woman. How she ended up in Romania (of all places) I never knew. I would muster the courage to ask her myself, face to face, woman to woman, but I can’t. Not anymore. Dead people don’t talk, unless one believes in supernatural, which I don’t. You cannot even start to imagine how proud I was as a child for having in me German roots. How naïve I was… How easy it is for me to understand now what that truly meant. Those roots were not only German, they were those of a traveler.
It took me exactly eighteen years to find a way to break free from a home I desperately needed to leave. I said to myself, a place is just a place. I convinced my heart that the thirst that burned inside of me was easy to appease by leaving. So I left for studies at a University eighty miles from home. You’d say, eighty miles is not that far. Well, for a country that’s still struggling to build highways and fails miserably at it, for a society that buries its people in low salaries and excessively high prices, for a family that barely afforded to pay for college and even less for public transportation, eighty miles is really far. It’s been ten years since I left and I don’t know where all that time has went. Fragments of it glisten now inside of me, like shiny shells on the smooth sand of beaches in the pearly light. It’s actually like watching a movie, with someone strangely familiar as a protagonist. If someone asked me all those years ago where I would end up, I wouldn’t have found the answer I know now.
I’ll never forget the day my life took the massive turn of trading a family for another, a country for another, a continent for another… I thought, so openly, so sincerely, that homes could be traded too. I said to myself, how hard can it be? Four thousand-four-hundred-and-seventeen miles. A small red arch on distancefromto.net. Two large completely stuffed suitcases and fifteen hours of flight. Two legal passes towards a Promised Land. Now, when the red arch still keeps me hanging with my heart up high on the wings of that airplane, when I remember that it’s much more than geography that changed the course of my days, I still ask myself: how hard can it be? How hard can it be to forget for a day, to stop listening to the complains of the soul, to think that Christmas and Easter are only dates in the calendar, that the Planet Earth is as large as an egg one can hold in the palm of a hand?
Like a snail I pass my days, every morning lifting the baggage on my back a little bit higher. I have hidden the truth in a remote corner of myself, careful not let it show. My husband has traded homes for good, he has planted the seed of permanence, devotedness and resolution in Canadian grounds. My son, born here, hasn’t even discovered yet the roots a family of travellers has buried inside of him and I hope with all the strength of my heart he never will. But me… The question still rises from time to time. How hard can it really be?
They say and maybe they mean it that home is where your heart is. When I think in how many little, highly valuable pieces my heart is truly divided, I know for a fact that I don’t have a home. I’m a leaf in the wind, dreaming about the breeze that bore me so long ago. I’m the cry of the seagulls over the troubled waters they can never leave. I’m here and I’m there, back where the cherry blossoms cover childhoods in white rains, where the air is thin with laughter and heavy with tears. The substance to glue all those broken shards together is still to be invented. Until then, all that’s left is the illusion I drown myself in.