Perhaps every migrant knows it’s impossible to truly return.

Perhaps departing too far from the center robs her of her sense of certainty,
like being pulled away from her mother’s hand by an anonymous crowd.

Perhaps a child’s first experience of death.

Perhaps we are all migrants,
opening doors to homes,
mistaking them for ours, meeting unfamiliar smells,
and shoes belonging to other people.

Then facing a nameless context,
an emptiness belonging to another, greater, rhythm.

Perhaps only a faint numbness registers the shock of finding how widely we have separated.

Perhaps it’s like that Haiku of Kobayashi about the fish cooling in a tub,
unaware it’s in a kitchen. Or that painting by Breugel where Icarus
falls with a splash in the background,
and nobody notices.

Perhaps a residue of that unheard splash remains,
like the sound of the bell leaving the bell,
the low frequency rhythm of life’s eternal repetition, the tension
between action and stillness, between being and becoming.

Perhaps we grieve for a lost center.

Perhaps then we attempt to build anew, to supply a site of habit,
a spatial border with walls, doors and barriers.
Perhaps a house with verticality and horizontality
to form a cross, a point of reference,
an axis from which to turn and unfold —
a still point from which movement is perceived.

Perhaps this point represents the self.
But what if the self is also moving?

Perhaps then we should speak of forms of uncertainty
and not of departure.