i carry a passport for a country made of light but my feet are still walking on cracked pavement. my accent is thick with the dialect of dust and disappointment. there's a low hum of homesickness behind my ribs. a constant, dull throb for a home i’ve never seen, a splinter i can't pull from a kingdom i've only heard rumors of in a book. i'm a citizen of the ache. a registered alien in the land of the dying with a visa stamped ‘not yet’. i taste it sometimes in the bread and the wine. a cheap cracker and grape juice that tastes like forever for a second. i hear it in the harmony when the saints forget to be polished and just sing broken. a preview of a language i don't speak yet, but somehow understand. the news feed scrolls like a judgment. nations sharpening steel against nations. bodies buried in spreadsheets. a human right is just a headline you scroll past on the way to a weather forecast. i'm a citizen of the ache. a registered alien in the land of the dying with a visa stamped ‘not yet’. and my own heart is a contested border, a civil war of want-to and do-not. the old man and the new man throwing rocks at each other across a fence. every sunrise is a truce that won't hold. with a visa stamped ‘not yet’. this whole creation groans. i hear it in the wind that rattles the window frame, in the ambulance siren that splits the night in two. and i'm just one more out-of-tune cello string in the orchestra of longing. i'm a citizen of the ache. so i'm learning the language of waiting. learning to breathe in the dust and exhale a prayer that sounds like a name. my king is coming. until then, this ache is the air i breathe.
