I met a man in a small coffee shop in the middle of the road. That old empty place where the bus always stops for a few minutes to make the trip smoother. He heard me speaking in Spanish and without hesitating came up to talk to me. As immigrants, I think we have a certain complicity with each other's past. Maybe that’s why we always rush the small talk to understand the reason we left home. “I divorced my wife and left my country. I came here seeking time off and now it’s been two years,” I smiled listening to him.
I wanted to tell him I also divorced my dreams when I came here, the only difference it’s that I’ve been seeking time off for two years now, but I didn’t want to be the hopeless, exhausted lady buying coffee in the middle of the road, so I continued the conversation.
I wanted to ask him if he also finds nostalgia in thinking about his past, or if he still can recognize his reflection from the past. I wanted to ask him if he also tries to ground the memories, or if he still wonders every night if everything was just a dream.
I wanted to tell him that leaving lovers in other countries is a trap because we always end up taking the memories in our carry-on baggage. I wanted to tell him borders are just mirrors and one day we stop coming back and start visiting. I wanted to tell him that loneliness is multilingual if we learn to listen, and that memories hide in our closet and come out when there’s silence. It’s hard to tell, but the sky is the same here and there, but life will never be. And none of us will either.
In the end, I didn’t say much because my coffee was getting cold and the bus was leaving without me but before walking away, I looked at him and said, “But it’s worth it, I think.”
“It was worth it,” he said.