Status Updates From All the Parts We Exile

“To have loved and been loved so abundantly, so intimately and to have to leave it behind, with no plan for return. Would it be another decade before I felt their embrace? Would it be two? This place had changed me. Where there was love, there was now an accompanying ache—a deep yearning and longing to be with them.”

“To love and care for each other so openly, so vulnerably, so abundantly, felt commonplace here. I felt a growing deep reverence for the closeness my mother and her sisters had.”

“enamoured of the people and places alike. Home was an overflowing thing here.”

“The charm I saw in my father didn’t translate here, where there was often an undertone of hostility and suspicion.”