The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

now, in place of that juvenescent fear, there is a different awareness: the knowledge that her attendance at the grammar school – and the place at university that followed, the career in academia – have set her apart from her family. However much she loves her parents, those decisions have – just as her dad predicted – set her on a different path, one which has taken her away from them, not just physically but in other, intangible ways too: in the way her family do not truly understand the work she does, the career she is passionate about, the adult she has become. Sometimes, returning home, Nell is overcome by a sense of loneliness: an intense feeling of dislocation that she is at once returning to the heart of her family, to the place she is most loved, and yet also to a place she is not entirely understood.

Ouchie