Tutto il mondo è una filanda...

(Taken directly from my Substack @svizzeratedesca)

This is how I have it in my mind: we are all floating in the same abyss.

A ballroom, a tavern, a club, a coffee shop.

Immigrant stories, so different, yet so similar.

We are all immigrants, or we carry the burden of the immigrants that came before us.

However different we might be, we all share the same spatial information ; that of not-belonging. That damn trance of unknowingness.

We all have a role to fulfil. Slowly and steadily we are to become a caricature of all the cultures we belong to, or are trying to belong to… with not belonging anywhere, at the end.

But how can we be here and there at the same time ? Doesn’t one cancel out the other ? We must be reminiscent of the motherland, yet more appreciative of the place that’s hosting us.

Borders. These man-made and man-thought arbitrary lines that give different names to brothers and connect lands that were never to be connected. How can we draw walls on something so uniting ?

And at the end, we are not from any place. We have created our own kingdom that transcends it all, an “immigrant limbo” we are all in.

This is not sociopolitical commentary I am writing. I would never delve into worlds I know nothing of.

It is an autobiographical piece of self and world reflection.

I have always been jealous of people who could put their words into thoughts. I seem to never pay attention to the words coming out of me.

I only occupy my mind with the guilt of those before me.

I would’ve said Jewish guilt, but it’s a universally shared immigrant guilt which creates a fraternity above ethnic descriptions.

It is a love story, essentially. With life herself.

She’s a woman worth dying for.