It has been five years since with uncertain footsteps I boarded a vessel bound for the West.

My luggage weighed heavy, my heart heavier still, leaden with a melancholy I did not yet know.

Plump with the dew of paradise, aflame with youthful irreverence, and in defiance of orthodoxies past, my exodus had brought me into a cold and exotic land. People spoke, I knew their words, and yet grasped not their meaning. People stared, I met their gaze, and yet ascertained not my reflection. People smiled, I returned in kind, and yet felt not the joy.

But then summer came, and icy dissonance thawed with kindred passion.

Friends were made, exams were sat, and awards were won. Along jagged skylines dwarfed by the titans of memories past, in winding streets overshadowed by the splendour of my forlorn Clifford home, my mind bloomed in an alien fog, nurtured by sun rays paler than snow.

In this formless haven I excelled, I grew, guided by a covenant between mother, father, and son. Bridges were built across serried peaks in uncharted lands, forging crystalline patterns in bicycle paddles, mathematics, and campsite fires. Ancient characters were forgot, and I began dreaming in foreign verse.

Within my veins a new valour course. My future glows bright with the sun. And yet with a returning gaze, I see rotating the fiery sword, hanging aloft the gates to my home.

Surging brine and turning clocks have sundered bonds forged of childish warmth. Faces emerge, adorned with new hair, new glasses, new scars, and I could utter not their names. People speak, I know their words, and yet grasp not their meaning. People stare, I meet their gaze, and yet ascertain not my reflection. People smile, I return in kind, and yet feel not the joy.

The marble columns and shining skyscrapers in the paradise of yore now stand as sentinels of a treasure I dare not disturb. As I walk along riverbanks honeyed by sweet memories, in the shadows of great monuments erected by my race, my heart stirs with both pity and pride. Still, it is across the sea that my mind, my passions, and my life now belong. So long as in fragments I can still find echoes of my past, I shall live content and forge ahead with an exuberance I soon will know.