Separation & Detachment

Lately I have been thinking a lot about both separation and detachment--how they are related and how they are distinct.  I started to think a lot about this as Emily and I moved out of our apartment in mid-July, thought about it more when we moved out of Buffalo for good, and more still since I've left the States.

There is a history of separation in my family, in various contexts.  My mother and father separated when I was 8 years old; some years before that, my mother's sister became the first person in her family's history to get a divorce (once a very taboo thing in a Roman Catholic culture).  In a different manner, my mother's father was separated from his family for much of his life, forced by economic hardship to work overseas, sometimes for years at a time, well before the age of cell phones and internet.  Much of my family in Spain has similar stories: courtships (leading up to marriages) that were almost entirely done via mail; out at sea around the world, for seven months at a time, without being able to see or speak to your family; missing the births of children and the deaths of parents, and so on.

Though in the physical sense these family members have been separated from their loved ones, when (re)united they share some of the most profound, sincere, and unbreakable bonds in any relationship I have ever witnessed.  In that vein I've tried to compare and contrast some of the separations in my life to the ones in my family.  The last two or three months we lived in Buffalo, everything about the city began to irritate and frustrate me.  The charm I had once found there, and the things about it that felt like "home" began to give way to new feelings, like that I was trapped or limited by a place I no longer cared for.  Similarly, shortly before moving out of our apartment, Emily and I sold and donated, or simply threw away, several of our belongings in preparation for eventual relocation into a smaller space.  I was separating from these things so that I could detach from them, so that I could move on and forget them.

With other separations, though, I have not felt much finality.  When I said goodbye to my grandmother as I left for the airport, she told me that, though she would miss me terribly, she was happy for me, and that certain kinds of separations are for the greater good.  Both my mother and my brother seemed to struggle very much when saying goodbye to me, overcome with ambivalent feelings about my departure; I wanted to cry with them, but ultimately a nervous smile and light-hearted joke felt like a more sincere response.  Though I am very far from my friends and my immediate family, I do not feel detached from the people that I love.  Physical distance is a poor way to measure how close you are to something, and accordingly I have not yet felt like I am away from home.