Immigration · fiction
Homesick while living abroad
A story about a Brazilian nurse on the night shift in the United Kingdom, a video call with her mother and the bridge we carry inside.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
At three in the morning, in the United Kingdom, the rain doesn't fall. It hangs in the air, as if too lazy to reach the ground.
The nurse watched that rain through the corridor window, on her break. She had forty minutes. Inside, the patients slept, and the machines made the steady little sound that, after a while, becomes a kind of music. She took her phone from her uniform pocket. In Brazil, it was eleven at night. Her mother would still be up, watching the soap opera.
Her mother answered with curlers in her hair.
"Sweetheart! Are you eating?"
"I am, Mom."
"You look thin."
"It's the camera."
"The camera doesn't make anyone thin."
They laughed. Behind her mother, the yellow kitchen wall, with the neighborhood pharmacy calendar and the image of a saint the nurse had known since before she could walk. Her mother turned the phone to show the backyard. Dark, but you could hear the crickets. The nurse closed her eyes to hear better.
And then she saw.
She saw herself at seven, in that same yard, lying on the warm concrete slab looking at the stars with her grandfather. Her grandfather said every star was a person who had gone away and who, from up there, kept watching over those who stayed. She asked whether the person felt homesick. Her grandfather said yes, that longing is the thread that keeps those who left from getting lost in the sky.
She saw herself at eighteen, at the airport, her mother crying behind the glass, she gripping her passport so hard she creased the cover.
She saw herself at thirty-four, now, in a hospital corridor on the other side of the ocean, caring for other people's children and parents.
And she saw herself at seventy, in a time that hasn't come yet. She didn't know where she was. It could be the yard, it could be right there, under that hanging rain. The place didn't matter. She was teaching a child to look at the stars, and saying the same thing as her grandfather: longing is the thread.
She opened her eyes. Her mother was still there, now showing the dog, which had put on weight.
"Mom."
"Yes, sweetheart."
"Sing that song."
Her mother didn't ask which one. She sang softly, off-key, the lullaby she used to sing when the girl had a fever. The nurse leaned her forehead against the cold window glass. On the other side, the rain still didn't fall.
She understood something simple. Her home hadn't been left behind. It had come along, folded inside her, like clothes folded in a suitcase. The yard, the crickets, the saint on the wall, her mother's off-key voice. All of it fit in a hospital corridor at three in the morning. The distance hadn't taken anything from her. It had only shown the size of what she carried.
The break ended. She put the phone away and went back inside. In room twelve, a ninety-year-old Englishwoman was awake, frightened, calling for someone who wasn't there.
The nurse sat on the edge of the bed, took her hand and, without thinking, began to sing her mother's song, in Portuguese.
The old woman didn't understand a word. But she calmed down.
Bairo says that, since he was a boy, he carried Brazil inside him before setting foot in the country, and that the bridge, for him, was capoeira. Read: Capoeira was the bridge.
The way forward
Longing isn't a sign that you were wrong to leave; it's the thread that ties you to what formed you. Keep small rituals with those who stayed, a call, a song, a recipe. And use what you brought to care for those nearby: home is also what we offer.