If you are an immigrant, or familiar with the experience of moving through different norms or planes — cultural, geographic, emotional — you may identify with the following piece.

How can someone feel so different.

So empty.
So alone.
So far away.

How can inhabiting the same Earth
Can sometimes feel so alien
Be such a different experience?

She missed the warm home moments back where she grew up. 
Home had always felt tumultuous —but at least people wanted to be near, to connect.
In her new (home? never!) town, her apartment always felt so big, so empty, so lacking.
She missed the noise back home. 
The traffic.
The way you had to always be on alert, always “on” —when you crossed the street, when you made it to the other end, when you got on the bus, while on the bus… but she also remembered the warm smiles, the easy laughs, the strangers volunteering their life stories as soon as they had an opening. 
Not to get anything out of you but a smile, a shared moment, a back and forth.
And the non-strangers? Well, they already knew all your life story, of course. They had been with you while it was happening; they wouldn’t have missed a thing.

She wondered if it had all been worth it.
If the space, the solitude, the bigger earnings… actually helped her feel fulfilled. Or more conflicted.

Big sigh. Tall Space Needle
Volunteer Park
Molly Moon’s
Cal Anderson

All at once and nowhere at the same time, 
She stared through her window into the blackest night
Being everywhere and nowhere
There and back again
Forever floating up, down,
Sideways
And once again,
              caught in the middle, with no end.