The Sea I Carry Within

There is always something beautiful about returning after being away.

I don’t believe migration is ever an easy choice.

People leave for many different reasons — some painful and unavoidable, others that may seem less dramatic — and yet each departure, in its own way, carries its own measure of grief and disorientation.

I had the privilege of choosing to leave my homeland, of stepping away in the hope of widening the horizon of what might be possible for me.

Others, now more than ever, are forced into that same movement, and I can only imagine the kind of pain that must hold.

After seven months in Vienna, I had the chance to spend twenty-four hours in Italy.

I held my family again, and I saw the sea — even if only from above, suspended in the open air between the wings of a Boeing 737.

And the sea is what I miss most.

The water. The force of something so immense that its edges can never be seen. A world within our world. A living, breathing lung that, because of us, is slowly losing its powers.

More than anything, it is the Mediterranean that I miss — that vast body of water holding so many shores together. The Mediterranean is more than a place. It is a feeling, a way of being, a quiet sense of belonging shaped by sisterhood and brotherhood.

For more than a year now, my mind has not stopped moving.

Thinking, thinking, thinking. And in these past weeks, those thoughts have only grown louder.

I want to be happy. I want to be present inside the moments I am given. And I try, as we all do. Sometimes I even manage it.

But somewhere beneath the heart and beneath the mind, all of us — still human — carry a constant grief.

Do you ever feel the pain of the world? I do. It walks beside me every day.

How do we survive this contemporary diaspora? How do we make sense of our emotions inside so much confusion? How do we make sure the right people prevail? How do we reclaim the land, the sea, our dignity? How do we remain human?

This is my small inner cauldron.

I pour into it fragments of everything I carry inside me, hoping that what emerges might become a kind of potion — something capable of healing at least one of us!