Wow, I catch myself using the past tense now. Not with the theatrics of the exile who has decided grief is a personality. I think this is more subtle like the way you stop setting a place at the table for someone who is not coming back. We had. There was. It used to.

Could it be that the shift in tense is how the body records what the mind has not yet admitted.

I want to be careful here, because this is a letter that could easily collapse into lament, and I have no interest in lament. Lament mistakes feeling for thinking, I think it circles the loss without ever measuring it. I would rather measure it.

What we had was not perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise is offering a country that existed only in childhood, when the days were longer and the adults had answers. The shortages the silences around certain names, the things families left unsaid across the dinner table because the walls were thin and the years were long, all of that was there, inside the better story we told ourselves.

Imperfect things remain real. And real things, when they go, leave a specific weight.

What I am trying to locate is not the country of the anthem or the flag. It is the country of a certain kind of ordinary life. The one with the predictability of a Thursday and a particular way a city smelled after November rain. The one with the knowledge that the people around you were oriented by the same references, that you were, without having agreed to it, from somewhere.

It can be argued or I guess I can argue that belonging is not love. It is quieter than love. You only recognise it in its absence.

And absence has a structure. It shows itself in small dislocations: in the way jokes now require explanation, and to a greater extent in the way a place begins to feel like a translation of itself.

Nothing dramatic announces the change. There is no single moment you can point to and say, here, this is where it ended. Instead, the ordinary loses its coherence. The background dissolves. What remains are fragments, intact on their own, no longer held together by anything that makes them a life.

This is what I mean when I say we once had a country. It was maybe an idea, but definitely  not a slogan, but a way of being that allowed life to proceed without constant negotiation.

It is that ease I find myself placing in the past tense.

I am not sure when ease became the right word for it. It sounds almost modest, almost insufficient for the thing I am describing. But ease is more honest than belonging, more honest than home. Home is too large a claim. Belonging by its very nature implies a community that consents to include you. Ease is simply what it was: the capacity to live without having to account for your own existence at every turn.

That accounting is exhausting. The people who left early sometimes describe the relief of the departure, and I used to hear it as ingratitude. I hear it differently now. Not so much as a verdict on the place, but as confession of how much energy it had been costing them to stay oriented.

The ones who stayed will tell you it is still possible. And they are right, in the way that a person is right when they say a marriage is intact. Intact is not the same as whole. Something intact has simply not yet broken in the place you are pressing.

I do not know what to do with what I have just written. I suspect that is the honest place to end.