Elara
The pigeon had gone. The courtyard was empty, the March light thin and clear on the stones below. I thought about the necklace, about the gap between 1963 and 1974, about the particular kind of grief that attached itself to objects that had been separated from where they belonged—that didn't quite disappear but became dispersed, distributed across the distance between the thing and its origin.
Repatriation was, at its core, a theory about belonging. About the claim that place made on things that had come from it. I'd written three hundred and forty pages about the ethics and the legal frameworks and the competing cultural narratives, and somewhere inside all of it was this simpler question:
What happens to a thing when it's taken from where it was made?
I picked up my coffee mug
