גלותדיק

02.24.2022

im thinking of ukraine. i don’t really let myself think of her often. i feel so lost, confused. like a rug pulled out from beneath my feet, in suspension. most days i feel such deep anger towards that place. sadness, pain…for the loss, the harm, the pogroms, the exiles. that my people and family were hated and hunted, repeatedly driven out; that we had to live in so many other places even before the shtetls there. that all we’ve ever known is leaving. we have always had to leave and leave and leave. never getting to return or say goodbye. i don’t have home.

i don’t know where i belong but i know we deserve home. please, one of them, any of them.

i think of the pain in my ancestors hearts to leave their lives, homes behind while fleeing. i think of the pain of how horrible it was to need to leave. of war. and it hurts even more to think of the family who stayed—who wanted so deeply to remain rooted in the same place. just once. who were genocided for it. that the few people who left…on instinct, feeling…that luck is the only reason for my life. they were killed like animals. one choice.

—

i feel hatred for nazis that hold power and move freely within this place. who will never let me or any of us return. i feel hatred towards imperialists ready to support and uplift more war, weapons, militarization. hatred, too, at the people who so willingly want war. who don’t know the pain & trauma of what it truly means. who don’t understand that life is not a political abstract.

—

this week…all i can do is think of the land. how my ancestors must have loved her so deeply even despite the violence. that they still would have fallen in love, watched the sunsets, picked ripe fruit on a dewy morning or stuck their toes in the sandy banks of the sea. they would have seen the moonlight on the water, dusk through the forests. the same moon and stars and planets above. god in the mountains.

god in the gardens, in music, in love. god in everything.

i don’t know what to think of this world. i don’t know how to feel or process it. it hurts. i am in a million pieces, trying to put my heart together. sometimes it all just feels like it’s too much to ever truly heal.

גלותדיק is a word i learned from a friend, meaning ”diasporic.” this is my heartbreak today. heartbreak that wanters without home, trying to locate itself.