Nonsense

A migrant's loss of sense

También podés leer la versión en castellano.

Coming from a town three times its size, I never thought this was a city. It’s always been more of a big village rather than a metropolis to me. But this afternoon it was rumbling like cities do: the sound of traffic, a tram passing, a siren in the distance, the pace of Friday evening rush hour. It made me feel, for the first time in years, that I was home, in the city. And it slipped away.

Photo by Kaspars Upmanis on Unsplash

I've lived here just as long as I've lived where I call home. Here should be just as familiar, but it's not. Although today, in a blur, I sensed that here was there—here being where I live now, and there, where I came from. Not "come from"; I've been gone too long to refer to myself as from there in the present tense. I use here/there because locations are irrelevant, and I don't want them to distract us. In today's world, everywhere is pretty much the same anyway.

Why, if I've been here just as long as there, is here so unfamiliar? Why, after more than a decade, did I just now, for the first time, feel this was home? And how did that feeling slip from my mind almost instantly, reminding me so vividly that I was not home? I kept cycling down the street, alienated by the sense of belonging of the people around me. I was surprised that I was still capable of belonging, and of how quickly that feeling vanished, as if the loss of practice made it an unsustainable effort. And suddenly, I saw the light. No, the JW missionaries that knocked on my door earlier today didn't get what they were after. I literally saw the light.

The bright spring Mediterranean sun was bouncing off the building windows. And the trams, and the cars, and the shops. It was blinding. The incandescent light made the air almost visible, dyeing the sky with an electric, unnatural, thick blue hue in an enormous dome. It was beautiful. Home—not here—the towering buildings that align the streets and the avenues keep the light out and frame the sky in a postcard-sized picture instead of a giant dome. The high-rises embrace the traffic’s exhaust, and the fine particles diffuse the light. It's beautiful, but it's a darker, more subtle beauty.

I’m well integrated here. I have friends, family, a good job, a nice home. A comfortable, modern existence. I can walk down the street and nobody would suspect my apartness. I look like the ideal person to help out a tourist find their way. In spite of that, the detachment was always there, and I never fully understood why until I saw that light. It wasn't my light. This other light made me squint. Colors looked different, people's skin had an imperceptibly different tone. It didn't only make the world look different; it made it feel different.

For all these years, I thought I couldn't shake off the unease of not belonging because the city was smaller compared to home. How foolish of me—I’ve heard time and again that size doesn't matter! It was the light. Deep down, my psyche had been trained to understand light in a different way. Every time I opened my eyes and this other light was present, my subconscious made me aware that I was here and not there.

The light, in the spring. But every season has its own surreptitious way of making me feel far away from where I once was. When summer comes and the windows are open, I hear the butanero’s tapping on the butane cylinder coming from a distance, instead of the high-pitched squeak of a bus’s wasted brake pads. In the fall, it’s the smell of roasted chestnuts instead of the sweet fragrance of candied peanuts on every corner. During the winter, the taste of my mother's cooking—something I've always missed here, and now, I also have to miss there. All year, the touch of a hug from my brothers and sisters.

If there's a shared experience between migrants, it's an occasional, fleeting sense of senselessness. A sort of sensory dementia. We can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, but from time to time the memory of how things felt before we left creeps in and leaves us confused. Or maybe I’m just talking nonsense.