The Weight of Elsewhere 'Part Three'

To: The Country of Absence Date: January 8th, 2025 Subject: Application for Residence Focus: Tentative hope Dear Canada, Here, in your vast territories of snow and possibility, I draw new maps from ash and remembering. Your winter tastes like metal and silence, your spring promises something I'm afraid to name. I'm learning your language of politeness— "Sorry" threading every sentence like prayer beads through anxious fingers. Your grocery stores smell like nothing I recognize, but I'm teaching myself to find home in their bright aisles. I trace on maps the places that once called me home, where doors opened wide as mother's embrace, where currency outlasted promises, where we learned to read between the lines of morning newspapers, between the silence of evening news. Here, I practice opening my own door to pizza delivery drivers who mispronounce my name but smile anyway. Please accept my application for tentative belonging, for the right to call your snow familiar. --- To: The Trees That Taught Me Date: Today (and every day after) Subject: Lessons in Adaptation Focus: Growth Dear Maple in my new backyard, You whisper your wisdom through my apartment window: Bend but never break, learn to grow in temporary soil. Your roots don't ask permission to claim foreign ground. Your leaves don't mourn the forest they left behind. Tonight, I follow your lesson: I plant my name in this going, watch it bloom in borrowed ground, water it with both tears and the first tentative laughter I've felt in months, tend it with the patience of someone learning to call winter home. *And finally call it home* With gratitude for your patient teaching, A name learning to grow roots in soil that doesn't remember my grandmother's garden. --- Some letters find their destination, others become destinations themselves. Tonight, I am both the sender and the address I'm trying to reach.