“Which place?”, stories of a refugee

I came to Greece thinking that I arrived in a real place. I thought I would be recognised here, that I would have a place in this world. I am wondering now, is there really a place for me? Nobody seems to know where to put me. I am alive. I am a human being. But I am pushed away from all places, I am transferred from one place to the other, I have no right to be at some places. I just seem to have the right to be in specific places in a given time. I am like an old shoe that nobody wants to wear. I have only the right to be unseen.
When I arrived in Greece I was detained for some days in a prison on an island. Then I was transferred to another prison on the mainland. When I was released I already felt the fear deep in my breath. I wondered what would happen next. I asked myself where to go and where to stay. In Athens I went to the neighbourhoods, where I could find my people. I was lucky to find a friend from my village who helped me out some days so I did not sleep on the streets. In my pocket I had a white paper that limited my legal existence in Europe to 30 days. The days passed by and I had no right on any place in this world anymore. I decided to leave this country which did not want me. In Patras I tried for some months to cross the border to Italy. I was living in the trains on a marshalling yard. The trains there were not used anymore. They had no place anymore, like me. As I couldn’t succeed, I left for Komunisia. I lived in the mountains, in the cold and the dark. My only shelter was a sky full of stars. I lived in the same city with Greek people, but my world was another and the two worlds did not meet. One day I was arrested in the port. The police brought me to a prison in the port. We were 27 persons in a cell for 6. After some days I was transferred to another prison close to the border of Albania. We stayed some days there. Again we were transferred. It seemed to me as if they did not know where to put us, where to store us so that we do not disturb their lives. The bus took us far away to a store house they called a prison. The windows were far away on top of the building, our only contact to the outside world. In the night when I was dreaming I found my own place, somewhere to belong. In the day I was brutally reminded of the reality. I stayed approx. for a month there and in the end they released me. Suddenly I was free again in the middle of nowhere supposed to find my way back to civilisation on my own. But which civilisation? Which place? My life in Greece is a real life in real places, but of another category. Places where I am “illegal”, places where I am hidden, places where I am limited to a ghetto of the paperless. And if the police catch me, I have to be in prisons. I have the strong feeling that they want me to understand that this will never be my place too, that there is no place for me here. I think I understood!
source:  schengendangle.jogspace.net