A Year

I have this weird kind of disinterest in talking about my time in Argentina. When people ask me "So, how was Argentina" I don't know quite what to say.

It was a year. And now I'm home.

Answering that question is a bit like trying to figure out what to say when someone would ask me "how are you doing?" in that slow, kind way that suggests they're not asking whether your breakfast sat well with you, or if you'd managed to avoid catching swine flu. They mean how are you dealing with grief but saying "so how's the grieving" sounds awkward. They're both difficult precisely because the past year, whether you start counting from February 5th or Feburary 15th, was not an event that happened, but a series of sea changes, a new reality that has to be accommodated.

It was a year. It gave me many things, it took away from me many things. I learned a great deal about myself and about others. I like to think I've grown. I think I've grown.

And it was also the worst year of my mother's life. I am home now something that feels truer than it ever has before. I'm redefining quite what that means and what my life is going to look like. So I don't quite know yet. I'd like to write about some of these changes. But things are still settling. And I have to learn how to write about people, who may actually affected by what I write. I want, perhaps need, to keep writing in some format, but the audience has changed, and some things are more personal--I spent a year writing to my family, but not about them. Things are different now.

There are still many things that need to be unpacked some dust that still needs to settle.

Coming Home

Another telling quote from my migration research:

"Viajar, perder paises, ser otro constantemente. La experiencia de la inmigracion te invita a ser otro. Empezar de cero es una nueva posibilidad, entusiasma tanto...viajar es maravilloso, pero es tambien maravilloso regresar.”

"To travel, to lose countries, to be the other constantly. The experience of immigration invites you to be the other. To start from scratch is a new possibility, it's invigorating...to travel is marvelous, but it's also marvelous to come home."

So true.

From "Emigracion reciente de Argentinos: el regreso a casa" by Marta Palomares, Celeste Castiglione and Lucila Nejamkis from the book Sur-Norte (page 172)