The Crossing

No one will notice, and very few people will find out about a date that is a milestone for me. This year will be the 40th year I have been living in the US. I came here as a 19 year old, fresh out of high school, and started walking a path that I had really no idea about as far as where it would take me. To this day, it feels like I carry an ocean inside of me, the ocean I crossed to get here. To this day, I feel that big distance between Europe where I came from and the US which has been my new home now for many more years than Belgium ever was. The longing to bridge that ocean of distance has remained strong. It feels like I want to build this very, very long rope bridge that would allow me to walk across to the other side. That sounds weird, I know. Perhaps the reason I feel that way is because the last time I was in Belgium, my country of birth, was 29 years ago. A series of circumstances, all of them unfortunate, led to this fact. Now that the tides have calmed and turned, the hope of returning for a nice long visit shows itself glimmering on the horizon like a new dawn. I have an aunt in Oostende who is very dear to my heart. She has known me my whole life, and I did get to see her 20 years ago when I visited her with my then 4 yr. old son, when she was visiting my parents and youngest sister in Georgia where they were living at the time. Through the loss of my father, who was her brother, and the tragic circumstances of the last years of his life, my aunt Lieve and I have become good friends, and we call each other several times a year for a nice long visit on the phone, kind of like a coffee lunch long distance, very enjoyable. She is a woman of great insight and intelligence, and combined with her warm heart and wicked sense of humour, she has taught me many useful insights into life and its at times unpredictable bends and turns. Through her, I have found the courage to re- establish connections with several of my cousins on my father's side, which has been heart warming after all these years of silence between us. Home is where the heart is. It sounds cliche enough, but when I think of all the experiences I went through, both good and bad, in my forty years here, the one anchor that saved me was that I met a good man with a steady heart, who gave me a home here and a son. The ache at the loss of my roots in my country of birth will never fade, but I have a home of my own in this country now, and that grows dearer to me with each passing day. It is hard work to integrate oneself into another culture, especially when you have no other family of your homeland nearby to ease the transition and remember the joys of speaking your native language, and keeping alive some of your native country's traditions and history. Being a lone wolf, going it incognito is difficult on good days, let alone on the sad or hard days. There remains a part of me that was emptied out, and remains yearning for closure that will never come because I lost my birth family, one after another, in a story of woe and loss too exhausting to revisit in this realization that I have lived in the US since 1976. A phone visit with my aunt in Belgium is a real treat. So often I have drawn inspiration, hope and courage from our talks. I take great pride in realizing that the best parts of me when it comes to persistence, endurance, resolve, wit and emotional resilience come from a part of her that I am also a part of because we are family, we are blood. In those moments, that endlessly long drawbridge between Belgium and the US is only a few steps long. As an immigrant, you have to be flexible, adaptable in order to stay relevant, in order not to become locked in the past, or even lost in it. My aunt makes sure I keep finding my way, and together with my husband and son, the journey continues forward, with every so often a longing look backwards to that long drawbridge from which I am forever now on the other side, with hopefully in the near future a nice long visit. The kind that requires packing a suitcase.