A Self-Imposed Exile

The afternoon goes quiet, and the dream comes back.

It was at Nisdorf. A dream. A woman. She asked me something I had no answer for then.

I have one now.

I left. Some will call it running away. They are not wrong.

A man who leaves wears two faces, depending which way he turns his head. Dispatch faces forward — toward the place ahead and the reason for going, the work, the thing that waits to be done. Exile faces back — toward the place left, the home that becomes an absence you carry. Everywhere you then stand is the wrong country.

I imposed both on myself. No state expelled me. No order sent me. I packed the bag and bought the ticket, crossed the border, into a country at war, and the leaving and the going were both mine.

What keeps it from being only flight: I went where I was needed, and where I was invited. You cannot send yourself to a place that never asked for you — that is exile with an address. A house in the Carpathians asked. So the road has a destination and not only an origin.

This answer has a dateline now. A stamp, a place, a day. You only mark where you are when you are not home. True as of today and no other; tomorrow the place will have moved under it.

It is still exile. Self-imposed, but exile. There is a life behind me that I chose to leave, and people in it I did not stop loving. I know what it cost. A reading of that choice I cannot disprove and will not try to. Both are true. There was one suitcase.

So, to her, three months on:

I sent myself. I was also sent.

Day 2 — Kompostieren — Soil and Peace
Lviv, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace | CC BY-SA 4.0
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