Images taken in Augusta, Georgia after Hurricane Helene.
“It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.” - Martyr!
Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details and others are exaggerated, the interior is however, predominantly in the heart… something no one person can add language too or give it meaning. The lovely thing about the unsayable, the never finished, ever-evolving, is that it is unsaid. It can only be felt. Much of your oral tradition, Milu, has been passed through generations; these are stories of dreams, fiction, myths, and a harsh reality.
Here is one story I have left to share with you,
You were born on soil that did not want you there. You feel most alive next to a few acres of Georgia trees built on the backs of people that no longer exist. Eradicated, erased, discounted. Much like how you feel all the time in the South. But the beautiful thing about these trees and about you, is that they are one and the same. Resilient. You don’t know this now, but much of your town will be destroyed. Eradicated, erased, discounted. Not by man, but by Mother Nature. And you happened to arrive back home to bear witness to it. You never accounted it to have much of a placeholder in your life, but my God, when you drove through those pine trees scattered everywhere for 3 hours, you couldn’t help but to cry.
It is human nature to never fully appreciate something as insignificant as Georgia trees, until it is gone. These trees are the only thing you appreciate in every city you continue to meet, and you often say, “This feels like Georgia, how luscious and green.” It is all you have ever known and all you continue to seek in every geographical location. Gentle, always in the background, but once they have fallen, how bewitching their suffering is to document. They are the true signifiers of Martyrdom; their presence can only be felt once, eradicated, erased, and discounted.
You will be asked to write about “home” soon, in 2025. Home to you is but a sentiment that has been omnipresent. It is all you think of my dear, and every waking minute, has been about home. This is thing about growing up American that you can never escape, we have no true home. Home is but an alternate reality we slip in and out of in conversation; home is what you cling to when you hear your parent’s stories. Home is not a place we can pin on a map, and never a person, but an unsayable feeling.
And there is more I can discuss with you on this, and how desperately I feel we could talk about the trees for eternity. The trees on Revere Place that do not exist, the trees on Clark Crossing that have been cut down by Mom, and the trees near Travelodge that never took root.
But I will leave you with this.
How difficult it is to leave one’s land?
When we are asked to leave all we have ever known,
do we cry for our land?
Our people, our water, our trees?
Where do our tears go?
ખુશીના આંસુ, દુઃખના નહીં
(Tears of happiness, not sadness)
Do they not come with us when we return?
