We left it all back there at the airport gate, behind the cage-like bars that separated those who said goodbye from those who left. Though those two things can be one and the same, it really depends on your perspective. I didn’t know what was what back then—I just thought we were going on a three-year-long adventure, and, strangely, three years seemed like a whisper, a sigh, a quick thing, even though I was just six. It was a lie meant to soften the largest change we would have to make in our entire lives, at least that is what we supposed, and my father elected to tell it. He told it to me, and I believed it, and no one dared to burst my bubble back then. It would be an adventure, and who could say no to that? I did not think much of all this as I glanced back, that icy January night, so Russian in its fierce cold that it bit you hard and would not let you go. I was being shuffled along by both my parents, their quiet fear pulling us forward. I glanced back and saw my grandparents, leaning against the black bars near the security gate. Were there really bars there back then, at that little airport in Russia, far north, where the wind howls and the snow-covered marshlands lie in wait? That is what I remember. It seems incongruous now; it brings to mind a penal colony, a punishment doled out,...
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