My Home, My Home!

 

My Home, My Home!

My Home, My Home! New York       Cesar Chelala My home, I want to come back to my home I don’t care how broken it stands; I just want a single wall  and I will rebuild it, says the old man, a grandfather of three sons, five grandchildren “I want to restart my family,” he pleads --he doesn’t know, he cannot know— that both his house and his family  no longer exist. He sits by the roadside,  on a rock beneath a silent sky, and weeps.  Exhausted, he curls into sleep, a small bag --all his belongings--  clutched to his chest. Yet he is a man of resolve. He will go back and start all over again, but he will have to do it alone, the last survivor of a vanished home. So many dreams crushed, so many lives that are no more.   Cesar Chelala, a New York writer, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award, and two national journalism awards from Argentina. Illustration by Paola Bilancieri