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 quietly slips in with photos filled with familiar faces,
always shadowed by the absence of those who should have been there.

You left home for something better.
For safety, stability, and a chance 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,
candles blown out without you.
You miss the first steps of nieces and nephews who may 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 offering quiet guidance and warm hugs, telling stories about when you were their age — mischief and all.
No lazy afternoons curled up on the couch together.
No holiday mornings starting with laughter and love 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 Highveld sky split open with a summer thunderstorm, or seeing the horizon burn red as the sun sets.
They don’t know the smell that rises from the earth after the first summer rain — that deep, unmistakable scent only African soil knows how to give.
They don’t fall asleep to jackals calling in the dark or burn their feet on December beach sand before diving into the Indian Ocean.

You carry guilt.
For leaving parents behind.
For not being there when something heavy needs lifting, 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 quite fitting in, even after all these years.
The way jokes land differently, because the humour here is not the humour you grew up with.

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 jacarandas warned of exam season, and that when the wind changed, a storm wasn’t far behind.

Here, you are always guessing.
The birds are strangers.
The seasons are unfamiliar.
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 memorise the smell of your mother’s kitchen.
You look too long at your father, counting the lines in his face.
And then, just like that, it’s time to go again.

Airports are always the worst.
Your heart breaks in the same shape every time.
And life goes on in South Africa.
Without you.

New restaurants open.
Babies are born.
People move, retire, fall in love, 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 you once lived fully, 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.

And yet, we carry home anyway.

In the way we pronounce certain words too warmly.
In how we laugh too loudly when we finally feel safe.
In the food we cook when we’re tired and need comfort,
and the music we play when the world feels sharp around the edges.

We build new lives with old hands.
We teach our children stories they didn’t grow up in,
hoping the roots will find their way through the cracks.
We turn friends into family and borrowed places into something that almost fits.

We are not ungrateful.
We are not weak.
We are simply human, carrying two worlds in one chest.

Some days, that weight is heavy.
But other days, it makes us rich beyond measure.

So if you feel this quiet grief too, know this:
It doesn’t mean you chose wrong.
It means you loved deeply.
It means you came from somewhere that stays with you.

Home did not leave you.
It learned to travel. 
And so did you.

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

© 2025 Carla James. 

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