Picture on the Expatriate’s Wall

THE picture on the expatriate’s wall. Two little girls, seated, in bright dresses and bright smiles. A green cardboard frame, containing the picture on the left, and on the right, a calendar of the year: 1996. An era recorded and unchanging, a multitude of associations as frozen as the captured young subjects in the photo.

In 1997 I moved home to Ireland for a stay that lasted just under a year. I became a voluntary exile from my other, real home. I left behind America, my parents, many friends, and the majority of my life experiences.

I fell into the habit of studying that picture of two young cousins. I wondered if it would become a relic of my personal Diaspora.

As a “first generation” Irish American I have been both an observer and a participant in the rites of separation. I know how long separation and displacement unfolds.
The phone calls, the letters, the frequent trips home to Ireland, and the less frequent visits from family across the world. The powerful emotions theses brief occasions impress upon memory, and the photos that capture the momentary and transient.

I looked at the picture and wondered. More than an image, more than a single moment had been preserved. Rather a whole reality, stilled. Ossified, say. That snapshot becomes the representative of the absent person it contains. The real person, absent, lives on and differently, as do I. We are no longer animate in the past; obviously, we have left it behind, in increments perhaps, or in giant leaps. Yet we don’t often experience change, that subtle continuum. Intellectually, we acknowledge it, but we don’t live it. The course is continual and gradual. Occasionally, we suffer the shock of it: Say upon reunion with a person or place after long separation.

The funny thing is no amount of letters or email or photos or updates of any kind between displaced family or friends ever displaces the memories, associations, and biases of our actual encounters over the years, and the photos and other relics that have documented them.

Physical memory remains primary, and it enshrines the past.

I encounter pictures of my past selves in the houses of relatives in Ireland I have visited over the years. There is always the strange sensation within me that my relatives are disappointed in my growth, in my maturity, in my difference. Old pictures make me uncomfortable. Who is this other person, this past me? Pathos, pathos at the heart of separation lies within this sensation. How sad and skewed is this connection between us: a few hour’s togetherness and a few photos?

My very return underscores the distortion between present-me and this old me, not-me. Then, my relatives and I spend the time reminiscing about that very past, the fulfillment of their expectation and understanding of me. Short visits and distant updates by letter and phone cannot prevent the ossification of memory. And yet, during these visits, the contrast, the distortion remained in the air, a discordant note. How much more pathetic for this situation to occur not with friends or cousins, but with a sister, or a mother?