When it hits close to home
Last September, in my home far from home1, it poured outside our window. We had never seen it rain like that the entire time since we moved to W, a whole year and a half before. As we watched, stuck indoors on a weekend, videos of familiar places submerged in floodwaters and read the news of the devastation in neighbouring states and countries, it turned out that rain of this sort was not a usual occurrence.
It was surreal to witness the river I often walked along burst its bank, to worry about the wellbeing of the family I knew whose home lay by it, to watch the canal I've once passed gush with floodwater and see the train stations I've travelled through drown in the rain. Having never experienced a flood of this sort in my life—the flash floods I know of where I'm from have never affected me personally or been serious enough to cause loss of life—this was the first and closest I had ever been to experiencing a flood. No longer a distant headline or a far-off article I read about in the news, this time, it hit close to home.
After returning home from my stay abroad, the thought stayed. In conversations about death, in chats about sickness and ill health, and in the physical changes that I suddenly noticed, the thought lingered. Faraway thoughts, the things I had never considered, that had never occurred to me, suddenly came near.
I was a child, young and free. I thought I would live forever. I thought my parents would live forever. Then I blinked. And all of a sudden, I am struggling to grasp what it would mean to me to live a life without the constant and forever of my mother and father. Suddenly, I notice the spider veins behind my mother's legs, more than there had been before. Suddenly, I catch sight of my father's glassy eyes—since when and for how long has it been this way? I think about what I read recently, that we're in the tail end, and it hits close to home.
Yesterday evening, when I saw the headline on my local news site, my heart stopped. And as I read further, my heart sank. A school shooting, in the country that was my home of almost two years until six months ago, the country that I still call home, the country that has a special place in my heart. I had travelled beyond W and made several trips to different places. G could have been a city I visited. This morning, I read a flurry of messages from concerned parents discussing the safety of the kindergarten my son was previously at.2 Then this evening, I checked the local news site I used to keep up with occasionally when in W, reading all things related with a heavy heart.
Today, all I know is that my heart longs for peace—peace for you, G and Ö, and peace to us all—for all the times it hits close to home.