We expats are constantly on the move from one country to another, losing and gaining homes again and again. Our life cycle is repetitive, comprised of 8 stages:
- Find a job, education or a home abroad (mind you, this part sometimes takes place after stage 7).
- Sell all the things we won’t need, and sort all that we will need.
- Say goodbye to our home and community.
- Pack our boxes.
- Fly to our new home.
- Wait for our boxes while getting acquainted with our new surroundings.
- Unpack our boxes.
- Start the process of creating home and community again, until the next move.
“Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
For expats and global citizens like me, we often pay little attention to the concept of home. In fact, we say that ‘home’ is not a physical place, at times. But, I believe we say that to make ourselves feel better. We can’t allow ourselves to get attached to a physical location, because, whether we like to admit it or not, it feels painful to leave it. And since we know that we will leave it indefinitely, we are cautious to not make it a real home.
Fortunately, if there is anything that an international lifestyle teaches us, it’s to be adaptable and agile when we are faced with adversity. So, if we cannot have a traditional home-life, then we bring home along with us wherever we go.
Home is where my habits have a habitat.
― Fiona Apple
There are other aspects of a home that are not entirely dependent on a geographical location or a physical building. For example, I bring personal recipes into new kitchens. I decorate new walls with old pictures. I establish a daily and weekly routine. Outside of a physical house I spread pieces of myself into my new community. I make friends with other expats, letting them know ‘I am here.’ I find locations like restaurants, bakeries and markets that become extensions of my home. I even take my language courses seriously so as to blur the line between a foreigner and a ‘homie.’
If Light Is In Your Heart
You Will Find Your Way Home.
― Rumi
I have been doing this for over 20 years now, recreating homes in many different houses. In fact, if I count it, I have moved houses about 14 times since I started living abroad. Today, as I am once again in stage 2 of the expat life cycle, selling things from my 14th home, I realize one more thing about the concept of home that I had never paid much attention to before–that home is something you cannot really deconstruct and break down when you are ready to leave it. Home is not something that turns into a just another rental, a random foreign cafes, or a forgotten language.
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
Rusty as it may be, languages I have learned in a particular country will always bring me close to that country and the home I had built there. My favorite cafes will always have a star on them in my google map and whenever browsing over it, my heart will skip a beat, reminding me of my home there. My paintings and framed pictures will always remind me of the walls they had hung on before. Because I have experienced it previously, I know that all of this will happen while I stare at the space where my panini maker once resided.
Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect
― JK Rowling,(Luna Lovegood) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I will get by with cold sandwiches for now, but I know that the empty corner my panini maker occupied previously will secretly let me hear the sizzling of the cheese until I leave the apartment. And when I settle in the new house, and get to the stage 8 of the life cycle, I will buy a new panini maker.
That’s when I’ll know that I have a home again, because as I make sandwiches, some pieces of the home I had built in Serbia will come right back to me. And they will mesh with the new experiences, splash onto the new walls, and fill the void in the new corners.
