Learning to say goodbye

By Barbara Anderson

"One must be careful what
takes with him when he leaves for good."
Leonora Carrington

My mom died two years ago, 7,500 kilometers away from me.
My dad died seven years ago, 15,000 kilometers away from me.
This week for the first time I returned home to Argentina. 

I needed to see what it was like to be in a space where my life had been for 18 years and where I returned to every summer, now without them waiting for me. 

Sitting in an empty kitchen, without aromas, without noises, without voices, without life, I thought that migrating, leaving, is a concept so broad that it does not fit in a single word. 

There is no name for that moment when we were unknowingly sharing the last meal, or when we gave each other the last kiss or took a picture of something that would disappear forever. 

There is no word to describe the need to start touring your childhood town as a tourist, to look at it in a different way, to walk it with a different pace and with a different purpose. 

I went back to my village and took pictures of unusual details and even of landscapes that I did not see (value?) when I lived there in the present, without passport in hand, without melancholy.