When They Too Are Gone[1]

It’s very strange to feel homesick without knowing where one is homesick for or even what one is homesick for, especially if one sits in the one place on earth one has longed for, for so long.

Manizales, the place of my birth and truly one of the world’s most beautiful places, not just the topography but the people, a place from which I felt exiled for far too many decades but still, back again, doing what I most feel I should be doing, a place from which I feel melancholy tugging at my heart as I dream of New York City, and as I dream of Charleston, places where misplaced parts of my soul abide.

It’s very strange to have had such a full life and yet feel so empty.

Irony abounds and echoes as I think of the adventures and misadventures of that child abroad in the wide world, the amazing people he met and the amazingly unexpected things he managed to accomplish, and strange to realize that the child is me, or at least deep within me.  I miss so many places and so many people but I guess that’s what comes from having truly lived a full life, one clearly not yet over.

It’s strange to sit and wonder what the future holds and then to eerily realize that not everything you miss is in the past, that there are things that seem to beckon, leaking in from the future, calling to me as my inchoate sons once did, asking when they’d be born.  And I wonder who those strangers, at least for now, are, and where they’re from and where we’ll meet and how I’ll feel when we meet, and sadly, how I’ll feel when they too are gone.