Porto Alegre

My mailing address has only read "Porto Alegre" three years, two years during high school for one year recently. All of the rest of my four decades my mailing address has been elsewhere in the world. So it’s surprising that every time an airplane takes off from Porto Alegre, ripping me out of the city as it climbs, there are tears in my eyes.  It never fails, as I watch Salgado Filho airport out of the plane’s window and the plane takes flight, as it distances itself from the ground, it rends my soul.  There is a bit of my soul that must remain behind because it can exist nowhere else. It's childhood memories and a hundred years of buried ancestors, it's long summer days of now faded vacations and the lesson that a loving carefree childhood must give way to whatever this is that I take on the plane with me. The soul that is mine today rips apart from the bit that must remain behind and comes with me on the airplane, and I cry. The soul I leave behind sits there, rooted to that spot on earth and whimpers, calling me to return. Over the decades I have learned to live without that piece of soul, over the years I have heard it call to me and I have felt the pain of a soul wanting to be whole again. But humans learn to live with pain and this was no different, I could almost forget I was in constant pain. And when I've answered the call and returned, my soul reunited with that bit of soul that remained rooted, whimpering and malnourished in the Porto Alegre soil and the pain subsided.

Now I know that leaving Porto Alegre will kill me some day.  Not a quick instant death, but rather a slow prolonged wearying of the soul that drains the life out of a person. And I understand more of a self destructive nature that plans to someday leave this place.