Bad apples

I thought about this question for a while. Before migration, the common assumption is that one will die wherever one was born. There is no reason to question where do I want to die if the connection to a single place is so strong that it doesn't make you question exactly who you are, where you are from, why are you there, and whether you want to remain there or not.

I was thinking about the people who died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and how they will never get to decide where to die. Most people don't, I guess. But there is something sad about dying away from home when you wish so badly to stay there.

This is a question that comes to mind when you have left the place you used to call home and you haven't grown roots in the place you've arrived to.

Once you spend enough time in a place that the place where you used to live stops being the only one with a home for you, you start asking this question to yourself. What is the last thing I want to see before I die. Will I be able to see that which I left behind before I die, will I be happy to see this new thing by then. Which soil do I want to root in. In my family, we'll be cremated and thrown at the sea like my grandma.

There is a popular song in Mexico that says something along the lines of "my beautiful, beloved Mexico, if I die far away from you, tell them to say I'm sleeping, and have them bring me back to you." And now that I'm away I've been thinking about it.

I have lost my sense of permanence. Sense of place, I think you'd call it in English. I don't know where I want to die, it's what I mean. I can't decide. The place I left behind doesn't exist anymore, and the place where I'm at right now is not the place that feels like home in my heart.

Time takes away the things you left behind. Whatever my country was when I left is no longer, and so whatever I remember, it doesn't exist anymore. It will never exist again.

We are privileged though. The people who died in the Mediterranean Sea didn't even get the chance to wonder if they would be sad to not be able to die where they were born. Is it unhealthy to have such an attachment to a place when so many of us are migrating?

I get to ask these questions because I have the privilege of having made it. And I think about that a lot sometimes. My experience as a migrant was a horrible one that I do not wish on anyone at all, and yet I was lucky enough to cross the border with papers. If my experience as a documented person was horrible enough to leave a lasting trauma and scars that are unlikely to heal, what was my grandma's cousin's experience like, when she had to cross the river with five small children and without knowing how to swim. The difference is that I have the privilege of wondering about it and she has shut it down enough that maybe by now it feels like a dream. Migrants don't talk about their experiences, and I wonder why, and I wonder if it is because talking about them makes them so much worse, or if it is because there are really no correct words to describe any of it.

Sometimes we're left to wonder at our own selfish wishes. What right do I have to do what I like doing when so many people couldn't make it. Or do I live this life for them.

One of the African migrants who made it into a refugee camp in France talked about the promises of The North. Europe promised them democracy and freedom and a better life. Nobody told them that The North always promises so many things but they are always lying. There is none of that in The North. It doesn't exist for their own people and it doesn't exist for those who dream about it under war skies and famine. We need to stop preaching the migrant fairy tale of a perfect country waiting for us.

It makes me angry every time I see a post on social media about a rich, European country looking for people to come live to their countryside because their population is declining because they don't need to invite strangers, they need to make themselves responsible for the atrocities they have helped commit that have caused so many refugees. Stop asking for people when you could just let refugees in.

Those posts may be fake, but my desire to slap someone whenever I see them is pretty real.

Everyone along the path refugees walk through thinks they're doing their best job. Refugee camps in Germany think refugees are having a great time there. But why. Why is it so difficult to treat them like people. Why is it so easy to yell at them to tell them to move from one place to another, why is it so difficult to give them information, why is it so difficult to provide them with proper transportation instead of moving them about in the back of trucks, "like pigs," my grandma would say. Why is it easier to send the police to arrest them instead of providing them help. Why is it easier to build walls.

How dare we talk about how horrible WWII was when we are still building concentration camps and treating people worse than we treat objects.

"Nobody said no to helping the tiger."

How is it so difficult for powerful countries who claim to have everything figured out to answer these questions. Maybe I'm just bitter.

If you could pick a place to die, would it be home? Do you have a place you call home? If you could pick a place to die, where would it be? I'm asking for myself.