THAT LIFE THAT GOES ON WITHOUT YOU (the country not taken)

I can hear my life vanishing on the other side of the ocean.

In the end, the road not taken is meaningless. Right, Frost? Things could've been otherwise, but they weren't. However, engaging in thinking about what could've been, as pointless as it may be, is no strange activity to most of us. When you leave a country, a place, with its people, its shops, its streets and its traditions in order to live in a different set of relations, the question somehow feels magnified. If I had stayed, what would my life be like? Some migrants say, "oh, i would've been like the rest, you know, got married, had kids, etc. etc. etc"... although people do those same things when they migrate, but, you know how much we, the people, like to think of ourselves as different from, you know, the people. Some others say that same statement with a more nostalgic tone, one that longs for some sort of stability. Either way, the life not lived in the homeland, or elsewhere, haunts many migrants. Would I have been happier? I often ask myself that question. Where should I have stopped, or ... should I keep going? Or is it just pointless anyway? 
Torturing questions aside, the life not lived is a ghost both for the migrant and for those who stayed. An absence is left behind,  temporarily in many cases,  but a void nonetheless. I find it shocking that this phenomenon is something so prevalent in our current world. It scares me a little bit to know that so many of us experience this kind of temporal absence of a geographical kind in some way or another. It is as, if not more, mundane than death, and it can also be very painful. I guess this is can be compared to the separation between lovers. The post-break-up phase where you sometimes wonder how it would've been if it had gone well... only it didn't.
Pointless reflections, maybe, but that nonetheless run through our minds in our nights of solitude (or bad company). And since today I am not in the mood for being pragmatic, here is a text that covers two of these emotional and despairing topics.

When I left our house in your country

For a while,  I couldn’t stand the touch another human being without missing your touch, the feeling of your body next to mine.

It hurt to touch another. Any other. 

I escaped it, the physical contact that for so long I had encouraged.

My nerve endings would remember us,

The way we watched tv in bed,

The way i laid behind you on our couch,

The way your hand rested on my leg in countless pubs,

The way you held me through the nights.

I wanted the days to pour through me so that I could begin to forget you,

And yet, when the details began to fade, I would go through moments in my head so that you stayed somewhere inside me.

And it rained, every single day it rained, but it wasnt our town, it wasnt our house. It was somewhere else, with no green fields, no birds, no clear sky to look forward to after the storms.

I could feel those feelings escaping slowly through the distance,

My presence no longer making noise, no longer stumbling through your ashtrays, no longer running up and down your stairs, no longer cleaning, no longer singing, no longer…

A new life… a new routine, forming around us, 

Marking our own end… helplessly.



And a little song about absence:  when you lie under different stars