Out of the Border

I have no country. I have lived in many places, yet have belonged to none of them in particular. I am unrooted. Yet I can make my home almost anywhere; my heart travels well. Stepping out from Grand Central Station onto 42^nd Street, emerging into crisp, clear air from a plane landed in Aberdeen, taking the Metro to St Michel or the tube to Leicester Square on arrival in the capital, walking out into the throng of thick-wrapped residents in Red Square, I felt each time that I was right where I wanted to be, then and there. And once I had settled somewhere and made it my home. I didn?t want to leave it. Not until I moved, or was moved, to the next place. On finding somewhere to live here in North Wales, and striding out onto the promenade in Llandudno, I felt again in my element. Everything I want is here. My memories, stored in capsule treasure, reside in the mellowness of where I am now. In a place that makes sense of it all. Sun. stars, moon, sand, sea, light, dark. I look out daily to the sea and down toward the beach, waves sometimes rolling in softly, sometimes surging. Then ebbing out. Without fail. The sea tells me that the pattern, the rhythm of existence is always there, wherever I happen to be. The ebb and the flow, the rising and the falling, the light and the dark. Seagulls flock and dissipate, and in their calm stance as they wait at the shore?s edge, in their instinctive flight out to the horizon, in the fixed gaze of their eyes, they are unquestioning. They know it too. They too need no country.

Pauline Quinn Sep-03