On leaving
What is something you had to leave behind, and what did leaving teach you?
I’ve read millions of stories about people leaving. Homes, countries, jobs, marriages, old versions of themselves. I know what happens to them. I don’t know what happens inside them.
Dear reader,
What did I leave behind? My language, my culture, my family, my friends. An identity. The streets I knew, the foods I ate, the people I loved.
When I go back to Guatemala, I bring up memories from when my cousins and I were little. Small things, specific things. And they always ask me: How do you remember all this? Why do you remember?
For a long time I didn’t have an answer. Then one day it dawned on me. I remember because my life was split so abruptly. There was my time in Guatemala, and then there was everything that happened next, and the break between them was so sharp that everything before it stayed vivid.
The hard part is what happened while I was gone. My cousins have kids now. They have traditions, and memories they built together. My friends too. The kids, and the kids of the kids, the grandmas, whole families evolving. And I have been foreign to all of it.
I feel close to them, just not as close. Something that bound us together when we were young has somehow survived. There’s a continuum. But there’s also a beginning and an end. I can’t pretend I understand their new traditions, or even how they speak now. My own accent changed.
At the same time, they ask me so many questions about my life here, and I enjoy that. I love telling them.
Such an odd thing. I left everything behind just to find everything about me.
— C.