Heartbreaks are part and parcel of moving residences
Opinion
By
Dorcas Mbugua
| Oct 26, 2025
More often than not, living as a migrant means eternally existing in a long-distance emotional marathon. The suitcase is never fully shut, yet old realities must be cast aside even temporarily, to make room for the new: new identities, new cultures, new accents, new rituals and, in my case, predominantly GMO food.
The day of departure is usually engulfed in fantasy: your own fantasies, fantasies imposed on you by friends and loved ones, fantasies of a reality far more glamorous in the realm of imagination than what is experienced on the other side of the runway.
I remember my last day in Nairobi before boarding the plane to Adelaide, South Australia. My friends had come to say goodbye, and since I was the first of the bunch to venture abroad, I had the assignment of making sure I update all my friends on whatever discoveries I made upon landing, a forewarning if you will.
Many of us leave our homes carrying what is quite often a final image of places and people, beloved and beloathed. Hope swells beyond what the suitcase can carry, and we tend to believe that all things will remain constant until we return. We go off and we are immediately immersed into the strange concept that is time difference. Friends and family are awake when your destination is asleep, and vice versa: there is a very small window for immediate responses, and even then, life has not stood still for you to process any of this.
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Back when I migrated, the most effective form of communication was emails. I emailed back and forth with friends and family, occasionally jumping on a Skype call to see each other in real time. The reality though, is that once everyone was settled in their country of choice or chance, communication began to taper off: adulting had begun to take a different shape for each of us. Suddenly, there was too much time between emails. The promises we made each other to remain in contact evaporated with the winds of change.
Attempting to coordinate holidays and reunions with friends on different continents became an extreme sport, one person planning to return home in the summer realizing that the same period is winter for another, the steep cost of return tickets, or shaky visa standing, all pointed to one reality. It would take a small miracle to reunite again.
Being a migrant also constitutes a series of miniature heartbreaks. Uncle so and so passed away, your mum is ill, you have a nephew you are trying to love through a screen, your grandma had another fall and needs immediate surgery, your dad’s business went bust and you will not be there to witness any of it. Your roots are now deepening elsewhere and as they do, you celebrate and mourn over a stable Wi-Fi connection. .
You try to cook chapati so that your taste buds can transport you back to your motherland, and the final result reminds you that even an attempt to replicate your favourite foods will fall short, because the grain from whence the flour came was artificially produced from your soil.
Being a migrant is forever bidding goodbye, even to yourself.