Two Homes, One Heart
Not subtraction but addition: a country made of the crossing itself
I am an old man now, and I have stopped asking which of my two countries is the real one.
For most of my life that question tormented me, as though I were obliged to choose a single loyalty.
I believed that to belong here I must first stop belonging there, and the never balanced.
A man divided against himself in this way is always paying a debt he can never clear.
The mistake, I see at last, lay in imagining the heart as a , with one pan rising as the other fell.
But the heart is not a ; it is a house, and a house can hold many rooms without strain.
In one room the lost country lives, unchanged, lit by a lamp I have never let go out.
In another the city that took me in is busy with its ordinary, beloved, complaining life.
The two rooms share a wall, and I have learned to walk between them without apology.
I am not half of one place and half of another; I am wholly both, which is a different .
Exile, I once thought, was , the steady taking away of everything a person is.
Now I think it may also be addition, the slow and painful acquiring of a second way to be at home.
No one would choose the cost of it, and I would undo my exile in an instant if the years allowed.
But since the years do not allow it, I have chosen instead to count what the loss has also given.
It gave me two windows onto the world where most people are granted only one.
From the double view, one sees that no single country holds the whole of what a life can be.
Each place I have loved corrects the other's certainties, and keeps me from the of belonging wholly.
I am a citizen of a border, and I have made a country of the crossing itself.
My grandchildren will not live this way, and I would not wish it on them for anything.
But I would like them to know that their grandfather was not diminished by having two homes.
He was, if anything, enlarged by it, stretched painfully wide until he could hold contradictions in peace.
The lamp in the first room still burns, and I it each morning as a man tends a grave.
But I no longer sit in that room alone, weeping, refusing the house its other warmth.
I open the door, and I let the two rooms breathe into each other, and the whole house is warm.
This, in the end, is what the years have taught me, and it is the only country I can leave behind.
Not a flag, not a border, not a name on a map, but a way of holding more than one love at once.
I carry both my countries inside me now, and neither weighs the other down.
When I am gone, the rooms will close, but the warmth, I trust, will have passed quietly into other houses.