I Always Think About Return

Listen to this poem read by Awadalla:

I have lived many exiles.
From a land tethered to my papers.
From a body intact-looking, brittle underneath.
From a tongue my mother spoke.
From the names I was given,
and the ones I gave away.

I have returned, too.
To half-ruined memories.
To songs I remember only in fragments.
To streets I no longer belong to,
but still walk in my dreams.

I used to think exile began in a foreign country.
Now I wonder if it begins with the first breath.
If birth is the first checkpoint we cross,
and death, sweet home,
the expanse of final return.

Exile is not a line you cross once.
It is a bruise, uninvited, returning
on the day I want to look perfect.
It erects new walls inside me.
It teaches me to leave,
even when I’ve just arrived.

Return is not a place.
It is a hunger,
a repetition, a compulsion,
a question pacing the quiet rooms
long after lights-out,
with no answer,
still demanding to be asked.

Each time I leave,
I say I’ll come back.
Each time I return,
I find something else missing.
Sometimes it’s a person.
Sometimes it’s myself.

There are exiles we choose.
And exiles that choose us.
There are returns we survive.
And returns we don’t.

Exile is Lot’s wife, turned to stone,
for the audacity of her backwards gaze.

Skinned myth turned flesh,
giving contour and meaning
to longing for a past calcified,
a ballad caged in a glance.

A metamorphosis slowed by endless delays,
not disappearance,
but a world excavated, postponed.
A butterfly emerging from the ruins,
stubbornly still becoming.

I always think about return
as if it could stitch the wound.
As if there weren’t a thousand little exits
waiting just beyond it.

I always think about return.
I always think about return.