An Exercise in Longing
Longing is the price of distance/travel/migration…the bicultural life. You can’t dissipate it, but you can channel it.
Isabel Allende writes in the introduction to her book Mi Pais Inventado that she writes “as a constant exercise in longing.” This is how, and why, I write, too. I can start a piece just by remembering, by sighing.
And I think anyone that has ever left a place they loved can relate to this; it’s like leaving a loved one, except the hole in your heart is shaped after a particular geography. You can’t help but do something about it, not as a solution, as a matter of returning, but as a way of making sense of those memories.
And of the perspective that come after, when you have crossed borders and your identity has widened.
Isabel y yo escribimos. Y tú?
Hoy grab that journal you’ve left blank and hidden in your desk drawer. Put pen to paper, sigh, begin. Pruébalo.
Un poquito mas:
