The Exile of the Rootless

Rastinews — A person is not the master of their own eyes; they cannot choose what to see, nor what to forget.

In the old days, when a child was born, people planted a sapling in the earth in the child's name. I had never asked myself until now: was a tree ever planted for me in this world? And if it was, what has that tree's life seen? What of its roots? How deep did they go? Who knows...

I thought of those who set out in search of generous soil to take root in. Those searching for a country to shelter in… The homeless…

Not belonging makes a person a stranger everywhere. Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day, right in the middle of a conversation, a memory suddenly stirs and pulls you back into the past.

In that moment, with a start, you remember: the trace of the past whose weight you carry, whose ache you have let grow inside you, is still hiding itself somewhere.

But if you ask what pains me most, what cuts deepest, I would say this: never once, in any period of my life, coming across even the shadow of a single friend left over from childhood, from youth, from those dusty roads to school, from an old neighborhood.

Everyone has a childhood friend, a university companion, a neighborhood pal somewhere in their life. When introducing them: "This is my childhood friend," "This is my schoolmate"… In me, there is only a great emptiness.

I envied them, deeply. Not in passing — I envied them until it scorched me inside. I always watched those lucky people who kept a piece of the past tucked around every corner. Those who carried the memory of a school desk together, two people sharing the same weight...

How strange — as a child I wanted to grow up and go far away, and once far away, you find yourself searching for a past to hold on to.

A voice that would say, "You used to laugh like that," a voice that had shared my first heartbeat, my first heartbreak, the wild, firecracker excitement of youth… What a deprivation it turns out to be, for a person to remain a stranger to their own past.

While everyone else carved their name into the trunk of a tree, I, like a leaf tossed about in a storm, never managed to carve my name into a single trunk in any of the countless cities I passed through.

Now, whenever I see two old friends embrace and wind time backward, somewhere inside me the frost of that old school road sets in. I grow cold.

Not being able to say, "You and I, back then..." is the heaviest exile a person can impose on themselves. My body is here; my soul hangs suspended in a void — I can neither grow old with anything nor take root in a new day. I only watch, observing my own homelessness inside the crowded memories of others.

Only those who cannot take root understand this. Only those who have lost their sense of belonging, who find the sky too narrow wherever they go, who feel they have no country, know this ache. And so do those who cannot fit inside their own body, their own soul...

Now I watch the lives passing me by, each caught up in its own rush, each trapped in its own dead end. Those blank stares fixed on empty space, those vast lonelinesses hidden away inside high-roofed houses, fitting into no hour of any clock...

Then the dreams step in. For a very long time, that old village where I was born used to come and settle right in the middle of my dreams. It was the one shelter that belonged to me, the one thing that tied me anywhere. Now even that is gone. Even my dreams have abandoned that past; the scenes closed, the lights went out.

This desolation growing inside me, because my soul has never quite found its place, is in truth the waiting of a geography that arrived too late.

These days I imagine a life whose shape I cannot picture, whose nature I do not know. It is not hope for the future — it is a timeless call.

As if, one day, somewhere beyond time, a door will open just a crack. That door, once I reach its threshold, will whisper to me: "Come inside. In there, your roots will embrace you."

By the well's edge, a tree will stand, its bark peeling away in flakes. Perhaps it is all an illusion, one last trick it is playing on me…

Yet even inside that illusion, a person still wants something real to hold on to.

If one night a dog's howl shook these streets, and I went to the window out of curiosity about the barking dogs... If I could hear again the most real sound in the world.

Or if I ran, with a child's mischief, toward the warm smell of dough drifting from some street-corner stall…

I imagine that tree, its roots sunk deep, its bark flaking away, its core surrendered to a great hollowness, yet still standing. I want to lose myself in the scent of that towering tree with its peeling bark, to sleep in its shade.