The idea came to me a few weeks ago.
Write, said this voice inside my head. But what was there to write about thousands of miles above the ground? I was once again going back, going home, and I wondered why I kept on leaving in the first place.
There is only homesickness, in the company of clouds, amidst nomadic whales, or in the middle of a crowd speaking in multiple tongues. We are, in the end, all nomads, driven by what we do not have. We search for home, even inside our own rooms, in our bed, inside our heads.
And our journeys are always solitary. Loneliness and homesickness share the same skin, both an agony of the restless. We are lonely precisely because we are haunted by the possibility of settling down, of wanting to be stationary. There are nights when we wish that our heads would stop thinking, just so our minds would stop from wandering too far.
In the end, I decided to heed the voice anyway. I write because of the same fire that beckoned others to wield the pen. I write because there are things that are better left to words, instead of pictures. Because there are experiences so moving that they deserve to have souls. And there are others that are simply worthy of the metaphors of heaven and light.
