Life offers opportunities that you cannot decline. What life offered her was not only a new chance to live again, to start over her life, but love, as well. She could finally find love, which she was searching for, for a long time ago … now.
Green and gray were the first colors she would remember well the first time she started her exploration throughout the city. As he drove and spoke about how much he had missed her all this time they were far from each other, she was listening to what he was telling her, but her eyes couldn’t not notice the beauty of the trees. She was looking at how they were swaying all along the way. She was enjoying the earthly color on their leaves. The green color was so vivid and bright.
She could feel its energy. The trees were so alive! Her head was turning right to left and left to right exploring not only the avenues, but also contemplating the splendor of the green creatures.
It was among the first things she remembered well. She could feel the freshness of the air and the energy of nature.
Gray was a color that she’d remember well when the plane landed off. Gray was, somehow, everywhere: all over the sky, in the streets, in every corner of the places she visited.
At first, she couldn’t realize how much she would miss her homeland because everything was new to her. She got a new life to carry on: new dreams, new landmarks, new people to meet, a new life.
She couldn’t reach this level yet since she just arrived. Yet as the days passed, she started to realize how hard it was to live away from one’s country, one’s territory; a territory where one was born in, grown in and lived in. She was even surprised at the feelings she started to feel. Feelings she had never thought she would ever feel once in her life. Homesickness.
She read a lot about these feelings in books about people who experienced diaspora or traveling. Books of poetry and slave narratives that she used to read and back then, she had tried so hard to grasp the meaning of “homesickness”. A feeling she had never been through before, and thus an unexplored feeling.
Today, however, this feeling became so real. Despite the effort she was doing to soothe what she was feeling inside of her, she wasn’t able to get rid of it. The feeling was all over her body, present throughout the days, but it was not constant.
There were some days where she felt herself joyful, happy and ready to explore her new setting, and other days she would feel nostalgic and eager to come back from where she came.
She was eager to come back to her home. Homeland; Country. Origins. A territory she would qualify as beautiful yet demolished by black thoughts; welcoming yet no longer fit to live in.
She came from a country with a strong cultural and historical heritage, a country where many people fought for the establishment of liberty, democracy, gender equality and above all patriotism.
She has been through a revolution and she had discovered part of herself she had never felt before or never thought this part would even exist in her: she was patriotic. She was proud to feel and be so. This pride came out of distinguished feelings one would experience in a lifetime in times of war, oppression, territorial, racial and national recognition and a sense of belonging.
Deep down oneself, one tends to always search for landmarks of ethnic recognition and a sense of belonging and when one reaches this state of being, one feels oneself belonging to a group or a nation that would determine who he or she is.
Through this dark period of her life, she had always questioned herself about her sense of belonging and how she would like to live the other part of her life.
Answers were always been in her head. She has always known the answers to her questions. She wanted to leave her country, her beloved country because as much as she loved this great country, she hated it so much.
She hated it so much as she hated herself.
Thanks to this country, she first knew the path to life, to sight, to senses; she had met the people who contributed to her becoming a young woman. This nation, not big as it may seem on any map of the world was, actually, historically and humanly big in reality, provided her with shelter, education, happiness, sadness, disgust, joy, uniqueness, jobs, a sense of belonging, a sense of non-belonging, light, darkness, recognition, rejection, abandonment, love, hatred … all feelings she had never imagined herself to express once in a lifetime.
This state of being she read about in books when she was a Lit student. She read about how African American poets expressed nostalgia whenever they spoke about their homeland, Africa; how much they missed it, how much they dreamt of returning to their roots, how much they missed its smell.
As she was writing these notes, she felt she was like these lost poets. She felt she reached this stage where feelings of homesickness became so damn true.
How could she forget about this country which made her become what she is now, a young accomplished woman … she would never forget about its greatness … would never forget about all the moments, bad yet good, she had lived so far there and the upcoming moments to live each time she decides to come back … again to visit.
She still remembers how many times she wished to leave her country to go and settle down somewhere else, where she can have a better life and thrive to be on the right way to the pursuit of happiness.
Back then, life was merciless and hard because as much as she tried to live, she was not able to do so.
Now she doesn’t regret her decision of having left her country. Nonetheless, one goes through states of nostalgia that are … naturally felt by many people before her.
Even though one may think that it is a joyful feeling to feel free and happy once you leave the place where you have always lived before, one is, actually, wrong.
One is wrong because we, as humans, never tend to forget the place where we first existed. One thinks one has the capacity or the strength of forgetting one’s past and starting over from scratch … but it is not true.
She has always believed, like many people before her, that the past is and will always be part of one’s life regardless of any attempts one does to prove the opposite.
Her past was the first step towards this state of redemption she has felt so far. Despite every kind of feeling she had felt before, feelings of despair, disgust, tiredness, failure … oblivion, she was grateful to her country, to her homeland for making her what she has become today.
A woman. A strong and a brave woman who has fought so hard to achieve her dreams and thrive to acclaim her rights.A woman who knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want. An accomplished woman whose pride is the fuel of her lost soul.
Her country was like a mother who took care of her, fed her, educated her, gave her the opportunity to enjoy life, grow among family and fellows, spread her wings towards the sky, have dreams and live.
But it soon ceased after the revolution and instead of ascending towards the blue sky, her wings were broken, her feathers were shattered and burnt … burnt out of corruption and oppression.
Instead, she was falling into a black and empty hole, descending into hell … a hell she had thought would never exist in a new-born country full of hopes and promises, but it appeared her dreams and the dreams of many others like her had been stolen and thrown into garbage.
She knew, deep down herself, that one day will come and she had to leave the place where she was born to chase new hopes and find herself in a new place, she’d call : her second home.
Her second home was her husband, it was the dwelling where her husband and love of her life lived for a dozen of years … now.
From moment to moment, she wailed from the inside because she missed the world she was trapped into, in her previous life, she’d missed her habits, her independence, her freedom, her world as a whole … and from the outside she would wrap her pain and homesickness over a ribbon of smile by lifting up slightly her small mouth.
Neyra Behi
A Foreigner's Journal 