Dazwischen

Yesterday in class we read a poem called "Dazwischen". It was written by a Turkish woman who is living in Germany and describes how difficult it is to be torn between two cultures and two worlds.

...Ich ändere mich
und bleibe doch gleich
und weiß nicht mehr,
wer ich bin.
Jeden Tag ist das Heimweh
unwiderstehlicher
aber die neue Heimat hält mich fest
Tag für Tag noch stärker...
("Dazwischen" by Alev Tekinay)

Suddenly I had tears in my eyes. I could completely empathize with the feeling of being neither here nor there. But in a way she is lucky: she could still identify with her homeland enough to miss it. At least she still has some palpable feeling of "Heimat".

Except for a couple of years in Michigan I've been living outside of the States for 15+ years, my entire adult life. I have moved around so often that I no longer feel especially connected to the places in which I live. There always comes a point when I feel "at home", but those ties are tenuous and houses and host countries are surprisingly interchangeable.

When people ask me where I'd like to "end up" I always just shrug my shoulders. I have no clue. Someplace sunny. Someplace with M. Someplace close to S and B, if possible. In this nomadic lifestyle I have chosen I belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a few years after I left college I used to hunker for the sights, smells and sounds of Gainesville. I missed my friends; I longed to lounge in the plaza square; I craved the greasy burritos we used to wolf down on the corner of 13th and University Avenue.

And, of course, when I finally went back I was painfully disappointed. My friends were gone, local pubs had changed hands and the campus had sprouted new landmarks. The very thing for which I had been so homesick had actually ceased to exist.

Of course there are good sides to a nomadic life as well. I've seen a lot, learned a lot, and have developed a level of compassion that I never would have thought was possible. Most days I can savor the richness of our international experience and appreciate my exposure to new horizons.

But yesterday I also briefly touched on the grief that comes with impermanence and the realization that roots which are severed never grow back as thick or as tenacious as they were in their original incarnation.

And as I was wallowing in this deep sense of loss and injustice I suddenly had an epiphany. Whether we are rooted to the spot or travelling to the ends of the earth, everyone has a sense of nostalgia for earlier times and places that exist only in memory and simply cannot be revisited.

Who doesn't feel a twinge when they remember dinners at Grandma's or the way the light filtered through the curtains in our bedrooms on warm summer evenings? We have all loved and lost and hold these memories close to our hearts. It is one of the many ties that binds us. And one of the things that reminds me that I do belong. Maybe not wholeheartedly to my country, but to humanity. to my generation. to my family and the small microcosm in which I am lucky enough to live...