Joyce was gone again. To the calm, peaceful land. Yet again, she heard Gabriel’s voice, and his words carried her into the past.
***
Joyce was leaving her parents’ house to go to the church: she and Gabriel will marry today. All her family surrounded her, her relatives, her friends…and she in her white wedding gown was waving goodbye to all of them. While tears streamed down her face, she remembered Oliver Wendell Holmes’ words:
Where we love is home.
Home that our feet may leave,
But not our hearts.
And she waved again with her white-gloved hand to these joyful yet sad familiar faces…
Gabriel carried his beautiful bride away from her parents, family, relatives, friends and far away from her country to his. She left her country, her home, her sea and all the people she loved and who loved her back even more, and she stepped into a new country, new life, new home.
***
Suddenly Gabriel’s voice brought her back to the present. She heard him asking a priest to give her his blessing, then she felt the priest’s hand on her forehead as he prayed. But she could no longer stay in this moment; she was drawn back to her wedding day. She and Gabriel were standing at the altar, she saw the priest placing the wedding crown on her head, and another crown on Gabriel’s head.
Reliving her happy memory, she smiled as she lay peacefully on her hospital bed. Seeing her smile, Gabriel and the priest believed that perhaps Joyce was not as far away as they had feared – and that she was waking up to what was going on around her.
***
Resting in that peaceful place, she thought about how much she and Gabriel were in love in those early days. His love for her grew greater still, probably because he wanted to fill the hole in her heart, having left all her loved ones and her dear country.
Yet she remembered how overwhelmed she had been by the friendliness of the American people. Every time someone said, “Hello, how are you doing?” she felt that they were really saying: “We know that you miss your family, but please accept us as your new family.” And she did.
She smiled again in her seemingly endless sleep. She thought about the first year of their marriage, how they played around like children, so happy to have each other: they traveled to Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Spain… The next year they had their first baby boy, and their life changed forever. It is one thing to be a couple but a completely different world, becoming a family. Beautiful change…
But Joyce could not remember one more thing after that. She felt tired and needed to go back and rest on the fluffy clouds.