Past for future

   I don't write all this much these days - the space in my house is crammed and so is my schedule and, to be honest, so is my head. Everything is brimming with things all the time: they are like bubbles, in their enclosure there's almost always just air but when they're present it seems impossible, unimaginable even to try to remove them. 

  Departure looms like a ghost over everything and there's not much to be done about it - the race against time was there before hand but now you can trick your mind that you see a finish line. It's a sensation I had buried in the past and though I welcome it back into my life I dread that I won't be able to handle it as well, 

  You should learn to leave for the right reasons - the first time I had attempted to leave it was in a very safe mode, planned out and stuff and in truth I was running away from myself. I was aware of this too. Now I'm running away from the mess I have made in this country (and the mess they made of me) and the country itself. There are bleak days ahead, staying here is like having a choke-hold around your mind. There are moments when you're used to it but often it drives you into despair.

  A friend briefly returning from abroad explains how flat her emotions are in her new home of a few years, how people here feel everything so much more, the sparks are more present here than there - perhaps it's due to our culture, so open among all things, and our tendency towards tragedy but also due to the fact that we are, after all, also children of this land: where you grow it never leaves you, every little thing has a different way in your mother-tongue. And there are things that you can not find as easily when you leave home.

  But the problem is, she says, that the same environment that presents her with an explosion of emotions almost always propels her into despair: all the people here are drowning, the conversations, as stimulating as they might be, at some point inevitably head south into bleak visions of present and future. Our land can give you some of the things that you desire: but more often than not you will pay a heavy price for them, your health and mental stability among the sacrificed. 

  I have been thinking a lot about the connection of space and memory and growth. In the future I would like to be able to work on the land that my grandfather worked on, to preserve something of the past. As my relatives perish one after the other, so does the memory of the family. There are stories that have never reached my ears that die out with every passing year.

  I have been thinking about it a lot as I am preparing to leave for a new country: by leaving I am sacrificing the chance to understand the past in order to build a semblance of a future.