Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong.

I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.

So I stayed and stayed, until one day I couldn’t stay any longer. I was made of a different kind of thing.

But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

Galway has a smudgeness to it, a tender haze.

“Yours is a terrible will,” he told me once. And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.

We ate the birds,” he says. “We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them.”

That I am of the leavers, the searchers, the wanderers. The ilk of those taken by the tides, instead of the steadfast, the true. But that a part of me has always wanted to belong here.

And here it is, even now, even after everything. The return of that mad thrill, the one I have been seeking all my life. It’s not right to be excited by danger, but I am. I am, even still. The only difference is that once I was proud of this and now it shames me.

I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave. It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.