Immigration, being illegal, life and death, overcrowded life-boats drifting away…
I can’t just draw a line and try to think of something else to write, to jump into another direction and leave the pain of the world be the pain of the world and not my own. There is more that I share with these people than I would like to think. The need to leave when things don’t seem to work as I would expect or as they should. The fall into the void, when I do not know what comes next and cannot even begin to fathom how I should approach the situation, the very thing that is happening. I can remember how often I kept saying to myself - “This is it!” Meaning, usually, this is the moment when I might fall, I might fall hard and break my neck. Or this is the moment I was waiting for my whole life but it seems to be swishing away, escaping my comprehension. Either way, it feels pretty much the same. Fear of heights. Up there but more fragile than ever, as if the gentlest gust of wind might carry me away and then smash me to pieces. Oscar Wao - it’s never the changes we want that change everything.
That’s how it might feel like for them. You have nothing to lose, you expect nothing beside getting to the shore alive and when you set foot on it, you have already won.
You cannot die during the whole enterprise. Because you are already dead. Dead souls swaying away at sea. Life is what you left behind. Life is where you were born, where you saw the light of day, where you learned your language, drank your milk and ate your bread. However bad it were, that’s where life was. Stepping out of it is like being sucked into a void with no way of knowing where you need to go or what you need to do. But you go ahead, you keep doing things, feeding the earth, you keep your mouth shut.
You are dead.