how to split yourself through time and place, notes on homecoming
the haunting continues
foreword: this is a short read, i did not do any research, just let my personal experience speak. i am privileged as an immigrant and i believe it is important to highlight, in times like these, what immigration means in all its shapes and forms, how it impacts people.
i chose to move to a different country and still regret it a lot of the time. nothing is easy about exporting yourself, your life or your family, away from the known. i am privileged because i am white, western european, and i had the choice - i can go back to a country still standing (though politically, we are sinking like many places in the west). i was more or less welcomed in the uk, though the winds are changing, but this is not the experience of many people. those who don’t have the choice, who are the less privileged, suffer the most. 1
I came back from my September pilgrimage in Brussels on Sunday. Exhausted, a little drunk, flooded by memories. The new ones, still fresh if blurry, the ones I made ten years ago and the ones in between. Five days, my past self took over my body, five days it floated me around the city. It is triggering to turn back time so easily, returning to the 20-year-old me, the good and the bad. The past nine years, evaporated, and for five days, I have learned nothing.
Does anyone who emigrated ever feel this way? As if you were suddenly this desarticulated person split between time and place and language? I am pulled, stretched, torn. The person I was then and there is not the one I am here and now. The one who speaks French is worlds apart from the one writing these lines, estranged and yet swirling together in the unconscious, fighting through my ribs to come to light. As if to say, this is my self, my body. As if to say, now it’s my turn to play.
A fever dream. For a few days after I come back, I am not sure of who I am, I am all upside down, confused and turmoiled. Right this minute, I feel my heart in my throat, ready to jump out and run back. It does not last. Routine picks up, and I am back. This person I was is buried once again, and another stranger emerges. Until next time.
Will I ever be one again? Or has this self-imposed exile created a division that can never be filled?
the foreword is longer than the article, i am fully aware. some things may not be clear when i pour myself into words and i wanted this to be clear: this is a story of emigration, of self-exile, of being a foreigner in two places at once.
ps: exile is forced, but through circumstances being abroad of my own volition can feel imposed when things don’t work or conditions change.