The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Six - Home Where My Love Lies Waiting*

"The Exhaustion of Diaspora" is a week long series of what it means to leave home and seek home and sometimes even find home, but not necessarily in any particular order.

***
And so it is time.

There is nothing much left to do. Outside it pours cold rain and inside all boxes meant to be packed have been packed, and all items meant to be left to offer the illusion of home to possible paying habitants have been tucked into our childhood bedroom -- the bedroom Florence moved into after shaking off an unhappy marriage and suffocating life.

(Once settled in our old bedroom, she never slept anywhere else with two exceptions. A brief period on the living room couch when one of us accidentally returned home and one night a year before she died, returning to her marital bedroom and crawling into the single bed the Home Attendants slept on. "This is my home," she said and refused to go back to her own bed. For some reason I was still in the house and gently coaxed her back into the bedroom she had claimed years ago by cooing softly to her "This is where you slept when you were very unhappy. This was a very unhappy place for you. But let's go back to the bed where you are happy. Your happy bed." And holding hands she and I walked back to her own bed where her sorrows and her joys were her own.)

Now what is left of her sorrows and her joys lies in a canister nestled in my big satchel along with little things like sandwich bags no longer needed there and her old mirror that she used to scrutinize her hand technique at her piano. There are numbers on the lid of the can and like any good Jew I think of the numbers given in the camps. The distillation of a person into a number.

Outside the rain is hard and the night dark. I am carrying too much for a bus and besides I have just missed one. Until gentrification, there were no cabs on Grand Street, but with the influx of the new residents buying at market value that clearly has changed because suddenly there is a shiny empty taxi right in front of me.

As we barrel up Essex Street, I look at the name of the driver. Mr. A. is from Togo. He hasn't been home in five years. It is very difficult being so far away from home, he tells me. But things aren't good there. And here he is studying mathematics at Columbia. But yes it is hard. He misses home. The way he says home and miss and family shreds what's left of my heart.

When this all began, I lost the man I loved, the one I believed I would die with, the home I thought we'd live in, the family I hope would always welcome me. But I'd make myself think of my grandmother at 17 getting on a ship and fleeing to America and never seeing her mother or her beloved favorite brother ever again. "Who the hell am I to think I am excused from Diaspora?," I would sternly admonish myself.

We leave our homes in boats and planes and taxis and cardboard cans. We leave with hope or in terror. We leave with our hearts broken or our hearts bursting open. But we leave.

The rain rains. Light skitters across wet streets and changing traffic signals. Diaspora begins.

*Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel)

Homeward bound
I wish I was
Homeward bound
Home, where my thoughts escaping
Home, where my musics playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me