In this new place, your body’s roots are exposed. You ripped them from home, and have yet to find suitable soil at first, on arrival.
It is the strangest place, arrival,
when the two places you have been coming toward overlay one another:
The place that you’ve been headed toward, which is not at all the place you’ve arrived.
And the place that is --which you entered-- but don’t yet understand.
It’s disorienting, this layering of expectation and reality: the place you hoped you’d find, and the place you actually arrived. You have to walk through one to find the other, which is not the one you want.
Your body is still adrift, in two places and also in no place. But you walk through the gate.
Because you are there.
This is the most difficult border to pass through.
Excerpt from EXODUS -- Libretto, below,
by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, 2016
“Walk through the gateway of iron-- built into the breast…
You simply walked through me, you, I walked from the gateway in the breast, both ways…”