The Cold Whispered

“Are you lost?” came the growl from a raggedy woman sitting outside the train station as I waited. “No, I’m fine, thank you”. “Are your toes cold?” she insisted, pointing at my sandals. “No, I’m perfectly fine. Thanks”, I replied, trying hard not to encourage the conversation. “Do you want to get high?” she finally said after about half a minute of silence. “No. I’m fine, but thanks anyway.” I said as I walked to wait at the other end of the station. The cold air pinched my hands as I pushed my bike along.

A whole year without setting foot on my home fast approaching, my third year on the other side of the Atlantic already started. It’ll soon be my sixth year gone, but who’s counting anyway? The visions of familiar shores, fields of green grass, yellow flowers and shades of blue everywhere. Fog fills the scene, I bike over an old bridge through a crowded market by a canal. Busses and scooters drive past me as I go past the rubble field walls and large cactus plants. The messy dream comes to an abrupt end at a traffic light, I’m back on the distant, unfamiliar shores of reality.

“Could I really go back?” I ask myself. They say the past is a foreign country, how could I think I even belong there anymore? What would I do, who would I meet? Do I still know my way around? I guess it would all come flooding back. After some years, you would never know I was any different, except if in conversation it came up that yes, I too lived abroad for a time.

Is that it then? Was that what it was all about. To say “Here am I. I left and was gone for many years. Then I came back”. Back with a fistful of cash and some good stories. Those neglected people, missed weddings and funerals. Growing nephews and aging parents. A decade lost, for what? Do I not owe it everyone to return with more than that?

Maybe going home is something you have to earn. When you set forth to seek your fortune, you return once you have found it. Or is that a trap? A mental vice to keep you away, like a reflexive self-defense mechanism guarding against some deeply repressed pain. Should I not face this fear? What exactly is it I’m afraid of?

And yet, I know I am destined to return. I could stay away another thirty years and still know it. The sea calls me back. In the guise of a city river or the wide and sandy shore of a big lake. Even if my next step takes me further away, in my heart I know I am actually getting closer.

Isn't it pretty?