Affairs of the heart.

I had long ago come to really dislike travel. Let me explain.

I am from a country where life is hard, not that life is not hard everywhere, but who feels it knowns it.

I lost my older brother to a horrible illness, and met death face to face as he suffered. I watched him go from vibrant youthfulness to being a shell of himself, before passing beyond the veil. He had been quite healthy until he traveled abroad for work and returned home ill.

Still life continued on as it always does.

So after finally acquiring my Visitor's Visa to visit the United States many years later, I was so very excited. I had graduated high school, attended other courses, found a job in Telecommunications and was looking forward to a fruitful life. After working for a number of years. I was ready to treat myself to a well earned vacation. So off I went on my first airplane adventure in the skies.

Before I left, my father and I had a small falling out, it was a trivial matter and he refused to speak to me.

My birthday dawned while I was away, it was almost time for me to return home from the two weeks break and I had shopped and bought him one of his favorite things, a gentleman's hat, among other carefully selected gifts.

Sometime in the evening the news came that my father, who had spoiled me as his favorite child of the eight of his children (perhaps because I looked so much like his mother) had gone missing.

On my birthday. When I had been out of the country.

I flew back home, and we checked hospitals, friends, all of his usual haunts and found no trace of him.

Then we went to the police station, and they told us they had a John Doe at the Morgue. Hoping beyond hope that it was not him, we were bitterly disappointed. They had been announcing the news on the radio, but who would listen to such a thing and believe that it pertained to them directly.

The police said they knew he could not be homeless because he was well dressed and well cared for, so they had hopes that someone would come to claim his body.

My father, while walking along the side of the road, had died in a car accident on my birthday.

Irony situation story short.

Years later, I again traveled to complete paperwork for my transition to the USA.

My mother died of a heart attack while I was away.

So you see, I have a really bad love affair with travelling outside of my country, although my life has been centered around a lot of travelling back and forth.

Those years and the memories have faded to the parts of one's psyche where they rear their heads from time to time. Where one remembers fondly the ones whom they have loved and lost, but who have been a defining presence in the shaping of the individual into which one will evolve into becoming.

I have not allowed grief or anger to cloud who I am. I remember my people with deep feelings of loss from time to time. But as life progresses, and one matures, we come to realize that every life and death serves a lesser or a higher purpose.

Is it prudent to say that one is born for a purpose and when that purpose is fulfilled, whether young or old, it is then time to move on to a plane where your presence is needed in the weaving of the threads of time.

Will it make it easier then to believe positively in the evolution and or metamorphosis of the origins of humanity.

I was blessed to have known them.

Somewhere on that different plane they watch over me and beseech me not to mourn but to rejoice, for they are happy.

Alas, my travelling days are still not over. But I have moved beyond the ethereal shadows where the dance of events happening in between the lines and folds of time intermingle.

Penning these nostalgic overtures is a task rather left far away back where time once lived.

Everything is connected.

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Hannah's challenge