There’s a silence that comes with living far from home.
Not the kind you notice right away
It creeps in between the celebrations you miss and the jokes you no longer fully get.
It quetly slipps in with the photos filled with familiar faces, yet always shadowed by the absence of those who should have been there

You left home for something better. For safety, stability, and a shot at something new.
And yes, Germany is wonderful.
But there’s a quiet price you pay,
And you carry it in your chest like a stone that never quite softens.

You miss birthdays, the candles blown out without you.
You miss the first steps of nieces and nephews
who might recognise your face, but not the warmth of your arms.
Weddings pass by in shaky livestreams and blurry photos.
You send gifts, voice notes, and heartfelt emojis, but nothing replaces being there. 
– When the cake is cut,
– When the music swells,
– When the tears fall in real time..

Your children grow up without cousins to tackle in the dirt.
Without grandparents to offer quiet guidance and warm hugs,
to tell stories about when you were their age, mischief and all.
No lazy afternoons spent curled up on the couch together,
no holiday mornings starting with love and laughter in their home.
And slowly, too slowly to notice at first, their South African-ness begins to fade.
They’ve never heard a hadida at dawn.
They didn’t grow up watching the beauty of a Highveld thunderstorm or seeing the sky turn a fiery red as the sun sets.
They don’t know the smell that rises from the earth after the first summer rain. The kind of scent only African soil knows how to give.
They don’t fall asleep to jackals calling in the dark
or burn their feet in December on the beach sand before diving into the Indian Ocean.

You carry guilt.
For leaving parents behind.
For not being there when they need help with something heavy,
Or when the doctor’s news is not what anyone hoped for.
You dread the call that will tell you something irreversible has happened, and you weren’t there to hold their hand.

But you don’t often speak about these things.
Because you’re “lucky.”
You got out. You made it.
You live in Europe, what could you possibly complain about?

So you keep it to yourself.
The ache of not fitting in, even after all these years.
The way the jokes fall flat because the humour here is different.
Back home, you could smell rain coming.
You knew which birdsong meant dawn, which spiders to leave alone.
You grew up knowing geelhout from a doringboom, how the jacarandas warned of exam season, and that if the wind changed, a storm wasn’t far behind.
Here, you are always guessing.
The birds are strangers, the seasons unfamiliar,
and the ground beneath your feet speaks a language you’re still learning.

Visits, when they happen, are short and packed too tight.
You cram a year’s worth of hugs into a week.
You try to remember the smell of your mother’s kitchen.
You stare too long at your father, memorising the lines of his face.
And then, just like that, it’s time to go again.

The airports are always the worst.
Your heart breaks in the same shape every time.

And life goes on back in South Africa.
Without you.

New restaurants open. Babies are born.
People move, retire, and get married.
The world turns, with or without you in it.
And you’re left watching from the outside,
Trying to stitch yourself into a life that you used to live in,
But now only visit.

No one really tells you that being an immigrant means living with one foot always reaching backwards.
It’s loving two places and belonging wholly to neither.
It’s building a life while quietly grieving another.

But if you feel this too, you’re not alone.

And just maybe, by saying it out loud, we carry it together.
Even across oceans.

© 2025 Carla James. 

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