Dear Wigleaf,

From my home in a Chicago suburb, I smell fall coming on: Robitussin, the dying embers of a Venezuelan barbecue, my hands clean and chapped from Dove soap. My children already have raspy throats, the neighbors scowl in anticipation of winter, and my husband is fighting with his mother on the phone. He wants to return to Baffa for a cousin's wedding and to visit his father's grave, but his mother would rather not accommodate him.

As an exile, you learn to accept seldom returning to a homeland five thousand miles away, from which your own mother sent you with dollar signs in your eyes for foreign lands and a curse in your mouth for your own country. Someone else sleeps on your old bed. Your things have long been broken or given away, and, of course, father is gone. Such is diaspora.

I have no fixed coordinates, no village to go back to. I've been trying to write myself home, to create a feeling of comfort, of belonging, of a place where I can make myself understood.

For sixteen years I've tried to convince a man to make his home in my heart. How long until that will be enough?

Here's to sixteen years and more, and a prayer for the displaced.

Much love,

Zehra