Exactly a year (and a few days ago) my partner and I moved to Australia. Over 52 years of existence between the two of us neatly packed into a total of two suitcases and two carry-ons. There was so much we left behind… not just in terms of things, but people and experiences.
I know I have been talking about this way too frequently recently. But I feel not enough gets written about your first year abroad, which is perhaps the toughest because you’re in a new culture, new landscape, trying to carve a small place for yourself, where you feel like you belong. All this while intensely missing your family, friends, familiar places, tastes, sensations and more.
It’s not easy making new friends as an adult I can tell you. (Will actively take suggestions on this).
We were newly married, and never dreamed of moving abroad but fate clearly had something else planned for us. It’s been a year since I saw my family in person and the longest I had gone without seeing them previously was perhaps a month.
I often sit back and think about how their lives – which were so closely intertwined with mine – are now moving on. And that’s the thing about life… as cliched as it sounds, it goes on.
But there’s often this nagging feeling at the back of my mind — will I ever truly belong here and call it home? And if I ever go back, will I ever truly belong there?
The places and people I know will keep on changing without me, there’ll be new scars, new experiences, new habits I will not know of, of people I used to see every day. They will celebrate various milestones without me, as I do without them.
If you can really call that celebrating, that is.
Will they see me differently? And will this gap widen between us, turn us into familiar strangers? Did this one decision really just alter the complete direction of our lives and all our relationships?
And amidst all this, what will I truly ever call home?
Home.
Perhaps that is what I long for. But what is home for people who move across the world leaving the familiar behind? You’re never truly here and never truly there… stuck in something of an in-between. Purgatory they call it.
Whenever I’m super nostalgic I tell my partner, “I miss home”. And he ever-so-sweetly asks me, “Am I not your home?”
That gets me. Perhaps home is not a place, but a feeling.
And maybe, just maybe…someday I will find a place that makes me feel like I’m home.
Incredibly profound, Mrinaal. And beautiful photos of you both.
Thank you so much, Felicity. You’re too kind!