Homecoming

On losing home and rediscovering it once again, loss and failure, renewal and rebirth. This is a distilled version my journey so far.

This post originally featured in Gather Zine, a magazine for writers and readers alike who have an interest in literature, ecology, wellbeing, and spirituality. I am honoured to have my writing included!

I left home at age 22 with not much more than a backpack enroute to an Asian country in a far flung corner of the world. The journey I was about to take would take me far away from all that was once familiar, comforting and stable. I didn’t know it then, but this was the most significant before and after moment of my life. 

It was the beginning of over a decade of foreignness; foreign food, foreign languages, foreign lovers, foreign living. I wanted to immerse myself in the different, the unknown and unfamiliar. I craved freedom from the ways of my own people and land. I liked the big, expansive mind of the liminal space between cultures and the fertile space of growth and transformation it opened up within me. 

Everytime I returned to my original place in the world, I felt more and more like a foreigner myself. All that was once familiar, now seemed unfamiliar. Everything that once gave me comfort, now invoked distaste. The ways of this original world bored me half to death. I could no longer relate to my people, nor could they relate to me. 

Unbeknownst to me, in the quiet passing of the years, the unthinkable had occurred: I had become a foreigner in my own land. “I feel more at home here than I do in my own country”, I used to tell people. For a while this was true. My trips back to my original place became less frequent. The ties that held me to that place grew weaker and more distant. I accepted that this original place was a part of my past but not part of my future. 

The pandemic served to sever this tie even more. Two Christmases passed and I didn’t return. I began to develop my own rituals to replace those of my original place and people. Then the unexpected happened. The land of my original place started to call me back. 

I first felt it just before the pandemic arrived. It spoke to me of the familiar countryside of my childhood. I saw woodland, a winter landscape of bare trees and brown leaves. I interpreted the feeling as a need to get out of the capital city where I lived and go in search of a more earth-centred existence closer to nature. 

I set out to make this new dream a reality, all the while believing that this foreign land contained within it my future. With all my heart I began to search for the source of the call, but to no avail. The years passed and still I was no closer. Over time, the life I had built for myself began to shrivel up and die. It no longer had any riches to offer me. Worse still, I could no longer hear the call. The dream that had felt so real seemed to have escaped like sand between my fingers. 

Deaf and blind to what I couldn’t bear to admit to myself, I continued to try to move forward with all my might.  Never did I question whether the call had come from this foreign land I inhabited or not. Such was my commitment and love for the place and people that had held me for the past nine years. 

Then, like a ray of sun that shatters all darkness, the call came again. I felt that familiar stirring deep within. It breathed new life into me like a summer breeze invigorating my senses yet breaking my heart at the same time. It was the unmistakable call to return to my original place, my original land, my original people. The world that I had built for myself in this foreign land caved in on me. Overnight I became homeless, without a place to call my own. I was to go back to where I had originally come from. Back to the land that I had called home.

Since then a year has passed. The unnameable grief for all I left behind was paralleled by untameable joy of being once again back in my country of birth. Now I have a place to call my own, in the part of the world that I also call my own: Home. The oak trees, silver birch and ash call to me in their resplendent autumn colours, greeting me like happy, bounding labradors. I walk on the land of my ancestors. I speak their language and eat their food.

I swapped cañas for a builder’s brew, tortilla de patata for Lancashire butter pies and darkly lit tabernas for my local pub. Not to mention the foreign lovers for a tradesman from Blackpool. I am no longer a foreigner in my own land. I am no different after all. I am the same as everyone else. 

I embrace the comfort of the familiar ways of my people. Yet I am also a hybrid, a mix of all the places I have lived, the friends I have made, the people I have loved, the foods I have tasted, the sights I have seen. They are all held within the gypsy heart of this British-born body I get to call home too. 

When I tell people where I used to live, the typical reaction is: “Why on earth did you come back here?!”, followed by a complaint about the weather. 

The answer is always the same: 

There’s no place like home.

Thank you to @gather_zine for inviting me to contribute and for publishing my writing for the first time in print! You can buy a print copy of the zine here.

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