about home & silver cages

There is something bittersweet about moving out of the place you always called home and finding another version of that place, across the ocean, many miles away.

There is a feeling that comes out of nowhere, a wave that covers all the senses for a while. It is sudden and it carries me so effortlessly to a place and time that are now too far away.

It is an early and crisp spring morning. I am sitting in our old living room, feet dangling from the sofa. The coarse fabric of the sofa and the cool breeze on my skin. All I hear is the chirping of birds, free ones and the ones that my dad keeps in the garden, in silver cages, even though I tried many times to set them free. They ended up coming back.

The wave is gone now.

The waves are not like the ones in the ocean back home. There you can count and choose to go under or over. These are unpredictable.

It is a warm summer morning. I am sitting at the big kitchen table, the fans are humming and the radio plays the news with the same tone and fuzziness, like it has been playing forever. I wonder if there is actually so much going on, does not seem like it.

The plastic that covers the table sticks to my sweaty arms while I eat another watermelon slice, spitting the seeds on my round amber plate. The house has a faint smell of naftaline, sweet coffee, and perfume. Grandma is walking around the kitchen with fresh fruits she just grabbed from the garden, a damp kitchen towel on top of her left shoulder, her short hair tied back with a plastic headband.

I am sitting in the same chair, many years later. Same plastic sticking to my arms, same smell, same noises, same grandma with a damp kitchen towel. It all stayed the same, but she looks a bit smaller and her hair is a bit thinner. The smile is the same, though.

The wave dissipates with a fuzzy feeling, the same feeling of cold water and air bubbles running through warm skin, after a big dive. I can tell I have been carried far away. The sounds on the radio sound the same, just in another language. The air is a bit too warm and humid, no fans running here, no grandma, and no kitchen towel on her shoulder.

I went back after a while. Like the birds, back to the place that was home.

It is a very weird feeling, I have to say. The places are still the same, same sounds and smells, but time went on.

Loved ones have felt so real and living inside my head during these months. The reality hits a bit harder when you are back at those places.

I stay for a while. I am trying so hard to keep these moments safely locked in a silver cage that I can carry around. I am grabbing and stuffing them inside the cage, making an effort to remember every smell and feeling and every curve of each simile for when I am back far away, across the ocean.

I am far away again now, quietly hoping each day that everything can stay the same until I am back, so I can fill up my cage a bit more.