‘I have been writing in pen and ink on paper to home’

It is winter again in California. The third winter I've been here - the first I've not gone home to visit Dublin. The drought that sat in dry, yellow afternoons all year is breaking a little - it has been raining heavy this week in San Francisco. The sound of it is the same as it would be on the windshield on my father's car or on the living room window of the house I grew up in. I have been spending a lot of time listening to this.

The digital landscape of Facebook and Twitter was once very comforting to me. My mother's name in a flashing blue box in the corner of the screen asking how I am - Sunday morning Skypes, tuning into house parties via webcam and watching the blur of the people I love mill around, taking turns saying hello.

It was enough for the first year, the voices in text, the faces in pixels. It was almost enough for the second, but now that my roots have started to try and anchor themselves to American soil, this connection to home falls too short.

Ireland online is not right for me - it is a pantomime of us, of how things were, and how things are. The truth is impossible to capture in something as flat as the internet - and the less I have engaged, the further I have pulled my hands from the keyboard, the closer to home I have felt.

In the distance, instead of fading, Ireland towers. It is everyone I have ever known standing on each other’s shoulders. Instead of disappearing or withering, it glows. In terms of landmass, the island could fit five times into the state of California, but rather than that making the country seem small, it feels intricate and ancient - a complicated, beautiful knot that I can never managed to figure out - or even hope to.

This winter I have been writing in pen and ink on paper to home. Cards, letters. Sending pieces of this world to that world, over the ocean. So much more tactile than the How R U Babes? of Facebook instant-messenger, so much more honest.

Here is the sound of the rain in pen, here is how I really am in the shape of my letters, here are things too big to type into a flashing box. Just between you and me, not you and me and Instagram. You cannot press 'like' on this, but you can keep it in your desk, or magnet it to your fridge. This is how I used to talk to my friends, even if distance and the ocean and three years has tried to change that.

I am sure my fresh letters are in a drawer in somebody’s desk. I can see all of you still, despite the distance - you are a lighthouse, even if I am out across the sea. I will send pieces of my new life back to add to the tower. I will come home again soon. I am happy to have been split between places. I am sure, somewhere in Ireland it is raining.

Sarah Maria Griffin has contributed several articles to Generation Emigration about homesickness, settling into life in San Francisco, how a cat made her feel at home, and more. Her book about her first year abroad, Not Lost, was published in 2013, and a new young adult novel Spare & Found Parts will be released in 2016 by Greenwillow Press.

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