Reflexion

The sun is shinning in Cork today, helping to improve the mood.

Life is changing. I can feel it in my boiling bloodstream, the positive feeling of change, of improvement, the sense of achievement that is raising with the new job that is almost starting and the upcoming trip back home.

It may look strange, but when I look back, just as little as a year and a half, I can see how my life as been so different before, the struggle that, even still existing, has turned into something so natural as breathing.

I miss Portugal, the blue sky, the green of our lands, the corn fields wide spread across my homeland.
I miss the smell of the sea and the sand, the rush of the people in the streets. Everybody always so busy, so concentrated in the daily self of the life that owns you, instead of the opposite.
The buildings that I re-discover now, every time I land back home, as if I was seeing their details for the first time.
The dreams I had when I was back there, of finding new roads for my soul abroad, discovering new land, new experiences, new cultures.

All of that is kept in a very dear part of me now, living memories that haunt me in my wakefulness, day dreams of a life shared between two hearths. The one I carry in my chest and the one I left back home, waiting for me to come back, hidden inside my family, my son's eyes, my mother's prayers.

But, then again, the sun is shinning in Cork today, I can feel the cold breeze from the river in my face and I know that the future will be bright.

Even when I complaint about this weather, most of the times grey, cold and rainy, is that breeze that keeps me going. That reminds me daily of what I've come here for. That brings me the laugh of my son from overseas and pushes me forward.

Some days, I get up in the morning with such an exhaustion attached to me that I can barely move. It's not (only) the body, the physical side of me. It's the exhaustion of the spirit, of an unbroken bond with everything I left back, and that will never be the same again.
The coffees with friends after work, in the cafe in the main square of my city. The stillness of the nights, listening to the cars driving down the highway next to my house. The hearth jumping if my brothers came home later that expected after a night out, the anxiety of knowing [that] they were safe and sound. The morning rush of everybody getting ready at the same time to go to work in the morning, swimming against the tide of a sea trying to suck hope from us. We never allowed it.
We kept our faith, we kept our strength  even in the worst moments, even when things seemed to be lost at the end of another day.

And now, time has almost come to go back. Ten months since I've last hold them in my arms, since I last woke up with my baby sleeping next to me, innocence and purity wide spread in his angel face.
Ten months since I last felt the warmth of the sunshine in my face, since I left slept in my bed, under my family's protection.

But life is good, everything is going to turn out OK. Life is, after all... Simple.