To feel so lost and be so certain that it’s because your home is calling to you, to be from somewhere else and leave long enough to not understand that place anymore, that is the migration.
I came home last week to find that the call vibrating in my bones is not calling me to this place as it is; I have been confusing a desire to explore my homelands with a burning nostalgia to go back to where there is no going.
My mom went down to Zarka the other day, and I couldn’t bring myself to join her. Zarka is the city I was born in, it is where my grandparents built us a life and it’s the place I thought I wanted to see the most.
This place is unrecognizable and I’m having a difficult time accepting how small of a part of me Jordan actually is. It didn’t want me then as an only child of a widow, and it doesn’t want me now as an adult woman raised in the west.
The pace of the rest of the planet has changed this place in a way that is much easier to see than it is in the States, and the changes here have left no place for returning strangers. I am a stranger here now, and I likely need not return.
Garbanzo Bae 