Miss me?

Do you miss me?  The assignment was write 10 questions that a friend in their home country might ask the students about their life in Boston. There were several 'When do (no, will) you visit?' questions and then down at the bottom of their lists: 'Do you miss me?'

At first I thought the question was put by my students to those left behind, but no, these students, all women, were imagining the wistfulness of the left-behinds who were saying, in effect: You're caught up in the excitement and travail of making a life in America. Isn't there something back here that's achingly missing from your life there? Namely, me?

When we say goodbye, especially in such a decisive way as emigration, we give each other something like lockets, not empty but filled with potent absence, a non-presence that continually struggles to turn itself inside out into become the actual being-there of the desired one.

When the two finally reunite, they may find to their dismay, however, that the absence has long since ceased its contorting, the anguish abated, quietus made. No, you are not missed.

My wife traveled with her sister this week through heavy morning traffic to a park in Portsmouth to meet, after many years, her niece (visiting from Italy) and, at long last, her niece's husband and grand nephews. Though the journey was long, the time was short, the people had to go, a quick bite, a few gifts, finis. Who are we that they should care? We're so old; they're so busy. Still, there was so little affect, she said. Miss their aunts or great aunts? Maybe not.

Looking around myself for you whom I miss, I don't see many. Daughter and grandson in Michigan, you  definitely provoke a pang when I contemplate especially how far away you are and how much of your lives I'm not participating in. Mother down in Connecticut, well, I'll be seeing you this weekend. Friends, you're all nearby. Whom or what do I miss? My youth? The youth of others? Former girlfriends? I wish you all the very best, but I don't miss you.

My friend Ami concedes the Brazilian word saudade may refer to more than homesickness or nostalgia, but a yearning for what may be unattainable, even impossible, which yet tugs at us, leaving us lonely and incomplete.

Is it you, God-in-love, that I miss? The enchantment that presence consistently provides, or at least offers? Is it your dazzling numinosity I crave, or perhaps what I glimpsed a couple of days ago talking with my friend Yori: the fundamental satisfaction of the simple, straightforward 2nd person encounter. Is it possible, in some way, maybe through such as these cumulatively, for us to somehow be fully together?

And, considering where you are, what you're doing, who else you're with: do you miss me?