August Prompt: Exile

Exile is an alien concept;

I think

I should need to sink deep roots into a place,

Tangle my memories with the history of my land, my country,

To be able to say,

This is my past, right here, this was where I used to be.

I do not have deep roots.

Not for lack of trying, for

I am always wishing to have a place

That means real and mine

That cannot be replicated elsewhere

Some call it a home; I do not recognize

Such a thing.

In the place of home, I have my used to be,

This used to be a library I went to with my mother;

This used to be an aquarium where I first saw a shark that hardly ever swam;

This used to be where my dad took us for a seafood dinner.

These were the first tendrils of roots to this country

Cut away by progress.

I have no idea how exile feels.

Is it a yearning or

An ache of a bleeding wound where you have been excised

From the mother plant?

Or a sensation that you have forgotten to wash a cup you used that morning

And you never return to that same kitchen to do the dishes?

Or a faint confusion, like

You know you should be there and not here,

But here is where you are and where you're stuck,

Away from there, where your soul longs to be.

Sometimes I envy the people who belong someplace

So deeply and strongly

They can detail a street corner

And rag on the family three doors down for not ever picking up after their dogs.

They know their great-grandmother plucked peas from that same garden

And their granddad played in the puddles on that same muddy lane that cuts through the park.

My roots search for soil

But each attempt

Is met with concrete and new construction.

I am not an exile;

I do not have a home.