Between Two Rivers

Homecoming (I)

Radiohead, “Killer Cars (Mogadon Version)” (1994)

NB: For the sequel to this (very early) piece, click here.

You’ve been here before. Lugging a full 27-inch suitcase and a bulging black duffel bag from the car up five short front steps, you enter the bright red door of the house your parents have lovingly curated for over a decade now, pushing the bags past the porch and into the foyer, a cool oasis from the unusual end-of-April 80-degree heat.

You’ve been here before. Your first impulse, after another seven-and-a-half flight from Brussels to Newark, after another slow march in line with all the other American citizens and green card holders through the immigration check, another half-hour wait for family (this time: your sister) to pick you up from Terminal B, another forty-minute drive barreling down the Turnpike to exit 9, is to take a shower.

You’ve been here before. Lying on your bed in the middle of a workday afternoon, you listen to the whoosh and vroom and honk of 30-mph traffic outside the window, watch the light glow and fade through the blinds, stare at the navy blue walls.

You’ve been here before, yes—but before you were here this time, you didn’t know how much you’d missed it.

April 29, 2024

home, homecoming, house, space
Water with Ice

Somewhere over the eastern Irish coast, at an altitude of 35,000 feet en route to Newark, two United flight attendants wheeled the drinks cart near my seat and began to take requests. I couldn’t hear what the people in front of me were ordering, but I did hear the attendants follow up with another question:

“Do you want that with ice?”
(more…)

April 29, 2024

America, Belgium, drinking, eating, Europe, flight, ice, water
Horizon

Ryo Fukui, “Horizon” (1978)

poised to take flight the seagull
tenses and contracts
its legs almost
imperceptibly
(more…)

April 29, 2024

birds, flight, homecoming, nervousness, Poetry, seagulls, travel
America
```
is the scent of summer rain rising from bright emerald grass
```
the seared underside of pork-and-chive dumplings family-wrapped with flour-tipped fingers
(more…)
April 28, 2024

America, birds, culture, drink, driving, food, homecoming, identity, memory, Music, nervousness, nostalgia, Poetry, politics, race

Mahjong

Fresh rain falling somewhere
from the North Sea strikes the stained
windowpanes and slatted tiles
of Flemish houses colored in terra cotta
and decades of rust.

(more…)

April 28, 2024

Belgium, China, family, jazz, mahjong, memory, nostalgia, Poetry

Preparations (II)

Ghent, 9 a.m.

Outside the forty-five-degree-angled windowpanes of my apartment, the ravens are cawing insistently, as they’ve done every morning for weeks. Another strain of birdsong, belonging to some species whose name I never learned, pierces the damp air. Sunlight sears against the whitening clouds, then breaks through and blinds my eyes.

Everything else, inside and outside the windows, is still. Motionless. Unchanging.
(more…)

April 27, 2024
Preparations (I)

I don’t know what this project is supposed to be yet. After three richly rewarding and emotional years of living and working in Belgium, I’m set to return to the United States (central New Jersey to be precise), the country and state I’d long considered to be my one ‘home.’ But three years is a long time: far longer in one sense than the 3600+ miles I’ve flown regularly on every trip between Brussels and Newark’s airports, and long enough in the other sense to discover that home was never fixed to any single place in my life.
(more…)

April 27, 2024