What do you take with you when you move to a different country?
Here’s what you don’t take:
Your library of books, collected over the years, gifted and inherited encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases.
Your collection of music on tapes and vinyl records. Those don’t make it.
Your friends, the ones you grew up with.
Your entire history: the city you were born in, the street you walked down to get to school, the park you hung out with your friends at, the favorite shortcuts to all the usual places.
The smells and sounds that cue you into feeling safe and secure because you are home.
Your accomplishments, your credentials, your work experience, how important you are. This gets erased when you cross the border, like etch-a-sketch.
Some like the clean slate.
Here’s what you take:
A whole suitcase of memories. You stuff the memory about leaving your home into a special secret compartment under the rest of them, to be dug up much later.
Only the best of your clothes. These, you later find, do not match the climate or style of your destination, but they’re the best you’ve got.
Lungs full of air. You inhale as much as you can when you leave and do not exhale until years later.
Only the most important documents.
Only the most important art. You will make more from the air in your lungs and the memories in the suitcase.
Money. If you have any. You bring all of it. Some of it has been traded for gold jewelry because gold will be sold later. For money, when you run out of it.
Language. Surrounded by foreign sounds, you keep your language preserved in a snow globe. Sometimes, you shake it a little to see the snowflakes fall and make sure it still works.
And so, as you embark on this odyssey into the unknown, your suitcase heavy with memories and the weight of what you've left behind, a new chapter begins. The books may be absent from your shelves, but their stories fill your mind. The songs from your tapes and records may be silenced, but the soundtrack of your life evolves with the unfamiliar music of your new surroundings.
Friends and family may be left in the rearview mirror, but you carry those connections, a security blanket woven from shared laughter and tragedies. Colorful threads run through it, like the streets of your faraway hometown, warming you on especially lonely nights.
Money buys time and opens doors. And then there's the language, your linguistic snow globe. Its quiet snowfall grounds you while, day after day, you mold your voice into unfamiliar shapes.
In this journey, you find that what you take and what you leave behind is rarely a physical object. As your eyes adjust to the harsh sunlight and your ears learn to ignore the background noise of the new land, you hold on to the intangibles. The smell of tangerine on New Year’s Eve, the emerald color of the Black Sea in April, the way a Ukrainian word fills your chest and makes you write poetry:
Коралі. Горнятко. Дівчина.
Creating your new immigrant identity may make you feel lost and disoriented. You will miss people and places. You will question who you are and whether you will ever fit in. But trust me, you will make it. You brought so much with you, a whole life’s worth.
P.S. Happy 20th immigration anniversary to my family!
