As I crossed the Atlantic after burying my brother in Galway, my whole body ached

I recently flew from Amsterdam to Bogotá, Colombia, with a stopover in Atlanta. Once we reached cruising altitude, I watched present time flit by on the in-flight screen in front of me and felt the past quietly activate and then dissipate again below me. Before long I had the sensation of flying somewhat intangibly above my former self in a kind of evaporating temporal order. North of London, I looked down and saw myself in the summers of 1968 and 1969 as a student working in a factory in Hammersmith. I packed bread on to delivery vans Monday through a half-day Saturday; Saturday afternoons, I scoured the bookshops of Tottenham Court Road for Beat poetry and Henry Miller novels then banned in Ireland. Saturday nights I saw Mrs Robinson and Easy Rider, or standing in the gods in West End theatres, I had the gist of the Boys in the Band on stage below me from a great height. There, too, I had my first introduction to Brecht.My flight approached Ireland just north of Dublin. On my return from London once upon a time, I sat a suitcase down outside Westland Row Station as my brother opened the car door on his side. We were busy talking, and when we looked again, the suitcase was gone. I had let my guard down, being home, and my summer’s earnings worth of clothes for the following year had disappeared into thin air.On Delta over Mayo, I could see Galway on my screen to my left. Galway was where I had originated for this trip earlier in the morning taking a 1.15am bus to Dublin to catch a 5.55am flight to Amsterdam. Now I was back over the same terrain in minutes. READ MOREGalway is where my life began, and it’s where I had just days before buried my brother. It’s where both of our lives had forever begun to have meaning. As my plane left Ireland and we began to cross the Atlantic, my whole body ached, and continued to ache for the rest of my journey to Colombia. Even today, weeks later, my bones register the acute pain of loss all down the extension of my spine and back, and in some general sense all over.From Westport, we headed transatlantic to Canada. It’s a trip that I took sometimes twice a year while my parents first, and then my mother alone was still alive. I lived in New York then. From my perspective now, it was a mere hop of a flight. Getting back to South America from Ireland is much more of a challenge. This trip to Bogotá from an unanticipated return to Galway took an unfathomable 26 hours. As we reached the Americas and began to cross down over New England, to my left on my flight tracker, I saw Boston. Boston is the city where I began in the 1970s to teach English as a second language, a career that has had extraordinary staying power; I still teach English classes today. Saturday mornings in the Boston years, I remember going midwinter to that city’s Chinatown to buy enamel plates and mugs with vintage Mao-era floral designs. I saw my first Rainer Werner Fassbinder films at the Arlington Street Cinema, a stone’s throw from where I taught English at the other end of Arlington Street weekday mornings and afternoons.A little farther inland, I could see western Massachusetts and even Columbia County, New York, where I spent many years secluded in an 1850s farmhouse. I was in my 50s then, and felt at home for a while perhaps for the first time since leaving Ireland in the early 1970s. Ultimately the severe winters and constant shovelling of snow beat that concept of home to the ground. From Albany, just below me now, I often flew this route to Atlanta on my way to Florida, where I would eventually move at the turn of the century.I hadn’t been to Atlanta for many years, and was surprised on landing at the general goodwill of everyone working at the airport. I was directed to a face scanner, and just like that I was admitted to the US, no passport required. Yes, I am also a US citizen after all these years. I had a two-hour layover, but by now, fatigue had set in and I just wanted to be home, wherever that might be.My new flight once airborne after a thunderstorm delay hugged the coastline down along Florida’s seashore just west of Miami. To the right on my screen, I saw Sarasota, a town where I found refuge from the winters of upstate New York. I have fond feelings for Sarasota; it was home for a while. There, at Bradenton College, many of my students were Colombian. You’re moving to Colombia, they said, disbelievingly, when they got wind of my plans. In fact, yes, I was planning to move to Colombia. I was ready for a new something to do with my life, and I did move with my two cats in 2010.The first time I flew into Colombia, I felt like I was flying into western Ireland; what I saw from above were rolling and damp green hills below. Colombia did not seem a country foreign to me at all. This time I remembered a student who had impressed me with the intensity of his feelings on coming home to Colombia from Europe. I was overjoyed to be back in Colombian airspace, he told me. I was home. At the time, I wished I could even once in my life enjoy the totality of that feeling, of just being home. I was jealous. At my best, I am a misplaced migrant in the world at large, and it can sometimes seem that our lot as emigrants is to never feel at home in any one place ever.As my plane approached Cartagena this time and continued onward to Bogotá, I had a new sensation. I could almost feel the rolling hills of Boyacá enveloping me from below, pulling me forward toward Bogotá. The sensation was more than close to what my student had once described.In Bogotá I hobbled with my cane along the priority line to the first available immigration agent. The officer there asked me for the purpose of my trip to Colombia. I live here, I answered, more tired than tired could be. Oh, you’re a resident, she said looking at her screen, a smile breaking across her face. Welcome home, she said then, handing me back my passport.She may not have actually said the words home in her welcome, but with the warmth of her greeting, those are the words that I heard. And after a 26-hour journey, what do you know, those were the words that at that moment I most wanted to hear.I was home.Christopher Burke is from Galway city. He left Ireland in 1971 and lives in Bogotá, ColombiaAre you Irish and living in another country? Would you like to share your experience in writing or by interview? You can use the form below, or email abroad@irishtimes.com. Irish Times Abroad submission guidelines here. Follow us on Instagram to keep up with the latestSign up to The Irish Times Abroad newsletter for Irish-connected people around the world.