Currents of Memory

I did not expect it

the way his voice carried the same weight

I have felt in the pauses

the same silence stretching wide 

when he speaks of a home

that no longer holds him

he told me how necessity chose for him 

how safety was the only compass 

when the streets no longer offered it 

And as he spoke

I saw my grandparents’ faces in his eyes 

the same salt-wet grief

for a life left behind 

the same pulse of longing 

that outlives geography

It is always the eyes 

isn’t it? 

The way they carry oceans 

currents of memory

pulling at the shore 

No matter the continent

the tide is the same

We like to think our stories are separate

his in these mountains

theirs across another sea

mine written in the listening. 

But in that moment 

I felt the thread

how migration stitches us together 

with a needle of loss, 

with a thread of survival

And isn’t that what makes us human? 

To know the taste of leaving

the bread that no longer tastes right

the air that is safe 

but foreign in the lungs

To know the ache of arriving

hope folded carefully

around a wound that never quite closed

I saw it in him

I see it in them

And in that recognition

I understood

our stories of departure

are irrevocably binding