Homecoming

Homecoming is an elusive feeling, and airports are curious borderlands.

I wait in a queue with a cup of coffee in my hand, and my mind goes back to the smell of my grandmother’s skin.

She turned to ashes earlier today, and now flows with the river that birthed my homeland.

My mother’s mother lies upon Her waves (the river is a mother; is a goddess), and imparts her strength to the mud underneath.

I think of how we keep losing parts of what builds us as soon as we begin growing older: people and places and names and things.

I wonder if life should be measured in losses.

I wonder what our bodies would look like if every loss were a scratch on the skin.

I wonder who I would be if not my mother’s daughter, and she, her mother’s.

Then again, in a way, I am them.

However, less fierce, less beautiful.

I take her scent in my mind. Perhaps that is what homecoming feels like.