The Epic of the Man Two Homelands Forgot

At an airport that swallows faces, a passport stamp splits the speaker's heart between his homeland and exile, where he is given a number, an address and the keys to a new house, and never the key to belonging. Years of distance pass through the telephone and the screen: his mother's voice saying they are fine, holidays spent kissing loved faces through glass, deaths arriving as notifications and weddings as photographs. When he finally returns, his childhood is gone: the old tree has become a concrete wall, the little shop a storefront that does not know him, and the stone of his childhood home seems to ask who he is, until he understands that the boy who left died somewhere between airports. Back in exile he feels relief at his own door and is frightened by it, discovering that he has become a place that appears on no map, between here and there, carrying keys that each open only part of a home. The book closes late at night, with the immigrant opening the window of memory to see a child with a small suitcase calling him by his childhood name, and with time standing at the door to tell him he has become a homeland without a home.