Where is my home?

Lately, it seems that all my conversations have revolved around the same idea: working towards something stable, finding a place to settle down, and, eventually, making it home. Tonight, sitting on my couch with a cup of tea, I find myself thinking about what the next steps of my life should look like…where I want to be, what I want to build, and whether I should move somewhere new. And, beneath all these questions, there is one that feels both familiar and strangely difficult to answer: where, and what, is home? I have spent much of my life surrounded by people who seem to belong to a place in a way I have never quite understood. They have a hometown, a family home, a place they return to; a landscape that feels like theirs, streets they know by heart, memories rooted in a particular corner of the world.

People who were born somewhere and simply…stayed. People who may have moved once, perhaps twice, and then built a life so deeply rooted that the place became an extension of who they are. I have a friend who was literally born in the kitchen of the home they live in now. Another who knows everyone on their street, whose family has lived in the same place for generations, whose name carries a history I can only imagine. Another lives in a town where everyone knows everyone else, where a single phone call can make almost anything happen because someone, somewhere, always knows someone. A place where they can go like “So much has changed in the last few years....there used to be a huge tree around here....”.

I cannot quite comprehend what it must feel like to belong to a place so completely.

My childhood was different. My father’s work meant that we moved often sometimes to places where I had to learn a new language just to understand the world around me. Before I could fully settle into one place, I was learning how to leave it. New houses, new schools, new streets, new accents, new ways of speaking and being. Each time, I learned how to become familiar with the unfamiliar. By the time the place I am living at has changed substantially, I have already moved.

Perhaps that is why the question Where is home? has never had an obvious answer for me.

Is home the place where you were born? I barely remember it. Is it the place where my parents are from? They were born at different places than where my family is supposed to be actually from and I have never lived in the actual place where we are actually from.

Is it the place where you spent the longest? There have been too many places, and none long enough to claim me entirely.

Is it the place where your family is? Even that has never meant one fixed point on a map. Also my family is scattered across different continents.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a place that remembers me. A street where people watched me grow. A shopkeeper who knew my name before I introduced myself. A neighbour who remembers what I looked like as a child. A house whose walls have witnessed not just my arrival, but my becoming. That tree I planted now bearing all the fruits or that cupboard that we hand painted and put stickers on.

Instead, I have memories scattered across maps. The house I first learned to walk, probably doesnt even exist anymore. The corner shop, where my mom would buy usual groceries from, probably is now aquired by someone else or has changed completely. The streets I used to ride my cycle in must have changed beyond recognition. Even the furnitures that I remember are now donated cause it was an hassle to keep moving them with us. Vintage or generational doesnt exist in my books.

As an adult, I now have a job that has made me move not just different cities or different states in a country, but literally different countries. The cycle repeats but on a global scale now. New places, new homes, new routines, new grocery stores to figure out and new bus and train routes to get used to and eventually, the inevitable question of where I belong.

Perhaps, for me, home has slowly come to mean something different. Maybe home is wherever I go to visit my folks, my parents, my sibling, or my partner. Maybe it is wherever I can crash for a while, let my guard down, be completely myself, and simply unwind. Home is wherever I get to buy a small indoor plant and put it on the shelf and water it, for however many days that I am there. Or maybe that place where I get to decorate the wall with all the fridge magnets and postcards that I keep collecting.

Perhaps home is less a place I belong to and more a place or a person-that lets me feel like I belong…if that makes sense?

Pieces of myself belong to different cities, different countries, different houses, different languages. I know how to arrive. I know how to adapt. I know how to make a temporary place feel familiar…I also know how to leave without knowing whether I will ever return. I don’t know if I know how to stay. And perhaps that is the strangest part of it all: I have lived in so many places that home has become less of a location and more of a feeling I am still trying to recognize.

Maybe some people inherit a sense of belonging. Maybe others spend their lives searching for it. I don’t know which one I am.

I only know that sometimes, when people ask me where I’m from, I hesitate not because I don’t know the answer, but because there are too many answers, and none of them feel complete and yet they all define me and have played a role in shaping who I am today.

So I keep wondering: Where is my home, if I have spent my whole life learning how to leave?