The expat is self-involved, due to the nature of his adventure. Life back home is mundane, the same, but here we are out exploring, peering over the edge, rounding the cape to seek new horizons. We are consumed with what we are encountering for the first time, navigating, processing and becoming engaged in unfamiliar surroundings. We seek not to compare but we must in order to comprehend. We attempt to articulate the similarities and differences but fail. Telling the story to those back home is always a diminishing event for all involved. Life here does not seem so vivid, even to us when we are there. And for them, our friends, the others, they cannot understand even if they desperately want to, what it is exactly we are doing with our time so far from civilization. They love us and we them but in a sense we are ghosts to one another.

Living far from the heart of home does not stem the tide of death. I thought that distance would breed a coolness and somehow keep me from suffering for them and with those people that I love. I wanted to escape that attachment because it had proven so painful. I ran and buried my head in the sand. Why would I not know that they would change, as if they are static while I am organic. Hair growing long, cut short and out again, weddings we attend but know nothing of the marriage, we exchange gifts at Christmas, spend a few nights laughing but mostly we are distanced from the ever day that yokes those ritual events. I have heard that babies have been born but have yet to see them. It’s all happening, so awful and ceaselessly and inevitably evidence of the beauty and wonder and mystery. When we are together again, I will miss you as you were then.

Popularity: 65% [?]