I.
I wonder where my life is:
Here, there or maybe
Some place in-between.
Like oil I dive in the clouded waters
Of the Belgian-Flemish manners,
Half submerged, half sailing
Through the shapeless urge
To melt the painful borders,
To love the foreignness,
To love it even under the airless,
Comfortable glass bell.
Easy to burst if only,
There wasn’t this complacency,
To stay blinded to your cryptic words,
To your well veiled norms.To keep walking in a bubble wearing
Lenses from across the seas,
Where my eyes don’t see
What natives can feel.
To slowly disappear when
Around me people speak
Like I ceased to exist,
And their words feel on my
Chest like thousands of fists.
To resist when as keepers of information,
They regulate your integration,
Often efforts are made by variation.

To love it even at night
When my heart is heavy,
Poisoned by homeless thoughts
And acid memories from home;
When my ears forget, what it’s like
To vibrate with the sound of
The sweet mother tongue.

To yearn it even when my uncertain words
Dissolve the understanding I
Too often took for granted;
When my body tires of words
That are not quite my own, of
Noises that don’t echo and can’t say
What I mean to convey.
To love and to be angry
In sounds that I don’t feel
In words that don’t reach me.

And yes to love it even when
The loneliness pursues you
In the aftermath of tiresome calls
Of friendless nights, and
Of no plans on Fridays.
When you can’t rejoice to hear
The gentle talk of lovers in the bus,
The gossip of friends on a terrace,
Eyes talk yes but is it enough?
And often, the frustrations
Of friendships being grown
And then brought to stagnation.
Family time left unspent and needs unmet,
All the moments we missed,
And the memories we did not create,
Tired of messages unread, unsent,
Flooding my phone with promises;
Of calls unplanned and postponed.
Unfulfilled by digital relationships,
Humans are not made to live
Through cold, clueless screens.
We’re built to graze our friends’ skin,
To read into their eyes and grieve,
Immersed in their laughs to feel,
The emotions during eye-to-eye
Fulfilling conversations.
To notice their body language
And pay attention to the way they
Avoid and engage, anger and appease.
I can’t do it through devices.
I miss spontaneity let’s go for coffee!
On Thursday? Likely in ten months…
Let’s catch up in fourteen hours
With the last three years of our lives
Who are you now and what will happen
When life gets fuller and unpredictable?

To cherish it even when I4m unsure
,Of which culture to pick,
Of which news to read.
Every choice leaves me syncing
With the past or the present,
With one land, or another.
To love and resent the differences,
In our childhood references,
In pop culture and movies,
Yet to yearn for sameness,
When sharing distant memories.
In this foreign though close land faces blur
In anonymity: only strangers.
No one is the baker nor my old primary teacher.
I don’t know the face of the postman,
I don’t recall the street names nor
Understand your name at first,
It’s all like floating sounds in sand.

To choose it even when I come back
And move with ease in a home
That has shed its familiar skin,
Pushing me to rediscover
A place that I left, in what feels like forever.

II.
Yet amidst the foreign unease,
I caught myself growing in love
With the people and their ways,
With paying attention to the details.
Home is not only a land and a sky
It’s mainly the people you meet
And all the habits and traditions you build.
Where the previously alien and unnoticed
Becomes the things you long for,
What makes you feel more than a stranger.It’s the daily ‘Bonjour’ from a kind neighbor,
The nameless network of smiles and faces,
Of how are you’s and honest exchanges.
The long awaited rare sunny days
When I see sudden population spikes,
Entire families on bikes and strangers
Enthusiastic to Arden hikes.
It’s walking down the streets in December,
Embracing the lights and families’ smiles,
Cherishing precious moments that matter.
It’s finding the perfect cheap spaghetti places,
Like Commerce, with lots of cheese, noise and faces.

It’s not everything but many things – enough – things,
It’s the nature and seasons that
The lockdowns made me see, like
The birds and blossoms around the corner,
Or the noisy baby ducks in the water.
It’s the daily walks with the furry sweet Esmée,
The Saturday rituals in a quiet cozy café,
The yoga sessions with friends in the park,
The not-so-rare warm brownies at the chocolate bar,
The annoying sounds of suitcases on Fridays,
The bike rides despite the wind and drizzling rain,
The spring work lunches in the sun, and
The trips to the hills they call mountains.

It’s the old lady who did not blink at the thought,
And just talked back English to me.
The children who reach sometimes too
Beyond the Flemish quietness and
Utter a few words in our common language.
It’s when the friends you make in foreign
Territories speak of how much they value you.
It’s when the love you built here
Wraps you in his arms of safety.
Where emotions are we need not speak
The same native words.
Connections have no borders,
Need no translator, no papers.
It’s never feeling lonely ’cause when
You reach for known arms, known words,
Someone always answers,
At the end souls speak to each other.

Getting a dog also bridged the alienation.
It revealed me to half a nation.
No matter in which language you say
‘Wat een mooi hondje!’,
I care that you say it bravely,
That your tone full of marvel
and awe will meet me halfway.
When loving animals we break
The invisible useless cage and
We all speak the same language.

After years, I caught my heart growing
In peace with the coexistence,
Of uncertainty, unrest and acceptance.
And before I knew it, organically growing,
I no longer clung to the language switching
No longer a victim of the broken bridges
A prisoner of the chosen glass bell
No longer surprised by what seemed alien.
In facing how I’ve changed and grown,
I know this is a place I’ll call home.

Here where my insecurities thrived,
I also opened my heart to the outside,
Like a mirror reflecting what I deeply struggled with
I now find ample room to breathe.
While my mind holds on to a dream of having it all,
All the people I love in one place,
The work that I eagerly wake up for
The culture and language I long for
On the land that vibrates with me.
I faced that with the upsides of
Leaving also come sacrifices.
But when I come home, I cherish each second,
Each silly moment and ordinary conversation,
With the loved ones and home I missed,
At the end, the present supplants the persistent feeling,
That my life will only start after I leave.

 

© Anaëlle Gonzalez. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share these poems for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, and without modification.