The act of leaving is quite paradoxical. You love yet you leave, you leave yet you love. Well, leaving the home you were given for another home that you made for yourself feels so. You don’t want to leave either of the places, yet you don’t fully belong to either of them. You’re here, but then, you’re there, yearning to be always there, somewhere that you don’t call here. You’ve never belonged here, so you search for a there that you can call yours, your home. You look a certain way now, you’re no longer considered someone from your hometown for you’ve become too much of there. Apparently, you don’t know about here for you’re aware only of the world, the otherly and not your hometown or the city that you’ve lived half your life in. “I didn’t mean that you don’t know anything,” they tell you when you utter an opinion, a word that is against theirs. They know more about your major, and of politics than you, for they are them, it seems. That’s all it takes, because it’s t(he)m.

Yet when Phoebe Bridgers sings the lines, “You never know how far from home you’re feeling/ Until you watch the shadows cross the ceilin’”, you’re back to being a tiny little girl, trapped inside a woman’s twenty-something old body, waiting for her father to take her with him on his bike, for when she hugged him, her tiny arms wrapped around him, she wouldn’t want a thing in the world but that moment. You lie there, in a bed that you camouflage into, sometimes, waiting for the winter to finally end, so that you can stop taking your pills. They let you live, now, don’t they? Those tiny bits are the reason you’re alive, you tell yourself, repeatedly, until one day, when you decide you don’t want to have any more reasons, you’re alright. You try to live, on your own, and it gets better, you’re alright, you’re alrig.. you’re al… you’re… you…y.

“Why do old memories constantly drift to the surface here In this unfamiliar city? When I go out into the streets, the scraps of conversation that pull into focus when the speaker brushes past me, the words stamped on street and stop signs, are almost all incomprehensible. At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable. The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.” ― Han Kang, The White Book

One day, you curse your mother for having let you be born, for letting yourself be treated the way you are, and the other, you’re sobbing, realising that she’s getting older. But nothing compares to the soft sobs that you make while on a video call with your sibling, there she is, right there, yet you can’t hug her and tell her that you’re so heartbroken that you’re afraid you won’t make it to the next time you can see her. Worse, the misery of watching her have a hard time back home, and yet having to leave the very next day. The joy of hugging her when you finally do make it to the next time you’re meeting her in person stays for a month, and there you are, watching the videos you’ve made together while packing yourself into a plane. She won’t ask you to stay longer, for she knows, she knows it all, yet you’re there, wondering if you should’ve stayed.

You want to leave, but you really don’t want to. You cry and cry, for you don’t know why you can’t stay. But you have to leave, you have to. Do you have to? Yes, you have to. You question what home even is. Is it your hometown, or the city you were born in, or is it the city you’ve lived the most in? Is home a person, is home the man who loved you till he couldn’t stay, or is it the woman who holds your heart in place when you get it broken? Or is home a thing you can hold? Is it the copy of Human Acts, or the coffee mug that reminds you to live? Or is home imaginary? A place you go to in your dreams? What about the people who call their memories their home? Maybe you’ll find your home in your memories? Why is home a fleeing feeling? A moment you’re home at the place you’ve lived all my worst fears in, the other, it’s in the arms of a man you love. One day, you’re cozy, feeling home at a library that has seen you shuffle through books, the other, you feel home at the cinema, watching a film with your sister.

It’s home that you yearn for, but of where? of here or of there?