It’s the long wave goodbye, that one that compels our breath into arrhythmic waves while leaving the heart to drown in a sea of pain.  It’s the wave your eyes hate to see while refusing to let go. This is the migrants’ lot. As you look back through the receding view of the rear glass of the car and see your loved ones waving, until that fateful bend swallows them up. Their cheeks pockmarked by rivulets of tears, some dry, the tears invisible but visible in their heaving chests. Over time the number of hands dwindle as the earth reabsorbs them into its bosom. And we leave each time with greater pain fearful of that day when there will be no more upraised hands to see.

So it has been with me over the last few decades as I bid goodbye to my family in my country of origin each time I leave them. Each farewell a memory, each memory a biting act of nostalgia. As we teeter between two shores, two islands, two homes. It is a pleasant conundrum, leaving one home for another, we are never truly leaving our habitat.  But it comes at a cost. There are new tombs to visit, new graves to stand by, it’s hard since we didn’t get a real chance to say goodbye. Those unsaid goodbyes create lasting scars, duties unfulfilled, responsibilities not taken. The permanent farewell is always harder, but it is unbearable when you feel you haven’t done your part, as children and…and grandchildren…as loved ones who have received the very best from them. True, the oceans that stand between us create logistical difficulties, but I cannot outgun that logic that it was my choice, still, to seek greener pastures.

We go through life, celebrating its joys, marking milestones reached, both ours’ and that of our offspring; but always with one ear inclined for that fateful call, or the imagination of it. Hoping it will never come, knowing very well that it will…one day, carrying their fragrance in the nostrils of our memory until then.

There is only one consolation, they wanted this for us, they wanted us to fly away to our dreams, they were happy with it. As one day we must do the same. Their love was never a prison. Perhaps then, the complete cycle will bring us some closure, some consolation. I issue a long sigh, one of…I am not sure.