The loneliness nobody sees

Migration loneliness is rarely about the absence of people. It is about the absence of people who already know. Nobody here remembers the house you grew up in, the name your grandmother called you, or how funny you are in your own language.

So you translate. You explain the festival, you soften the accent, you edit the story down to the version that lands. It works, and it costs. By Friday you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

Back home, meanwhile, you have become the one who left. Conversations skim the surface. You do not mention the panic in the car park last Tuesday, because it would only worry them, and because it would need too much context.

The work is not to find more friends. It is to stop performing a version of yourself in every room, and to have one place where the whole of it can be said without translation.