Homesick Without a Home?
December, 2014
Can I be homesick?
The first “home” I remember is the student housing complex where my parents were living at the time of my birth. I remember a sandbox where I’d consume my suggested daily value of sand and I remember climbing a bike rack and possibly my first concussion.
As well as a toddler can, I remember our first move, to our next home: an apartment across Helsinki near the amusement park, from which every morning we could hear the sounds of peacocks waking up. It was small when we lived there - my mother, my father, my two brothers and I. I remember our backyard, with its sheltering of sparse Finnish trees and its seemingly steep cliff on top of which we would eat after sauna-ing, the bustling if still at the time slightly scary street outside and the furry and huge though friendly dog that lived next door that always seemed so excited at our footsteps it threatened to burst through and bury us in kisses, to the horror of my younger brother who was at the time afraid of all canine varieties despite size or ferocity. I'll grant that we may actually have lived in two apartments in that building but there time found us when the next time to move again.
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| Soumi |
But this time we weren't traveling just to the other side of the neighborhood like last time. We weren't settling into the suburbs of Helsinki where my aunt lived in what then seemed like a mysterious haunted castle. We weren't going to live at the farm my mother’s family owned where I remember Santa Claus coming with his portly belly to try to give me my presents only for me to hide behind the Christmas tree. We weren't picking up to go to marvel the colder, more northern Finland I hardly knew, to Joensuu where my grandparents lived in a two (maybe three?) floor house with a great yard and berry bushes where my father and his siblings had once lived.
We were flying over a vast ocean to a distant foreign land called America, though at the farewell party. my parents assured all our friends and family that it wouldn’t be a long stay; a year for my father to complete some post doctorate work at a place called Yale. I ran around, intermittently wearing nothing but face paint, and danced and shouted with my friends. To me, this was also my 5th birthday and I wasn’t going to be robbed of a chance to have some fun. A year meant nothing to me, unawares as I was of how time twists and turns into over a decade so easily.
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| America the Cozy in Connecticut |
First came the condominium in Connecticut, where we arrived with our belongings in an assortment of suitcases and cardboards in the middle of a blizzard and made quick friends with the only neighbors willing to brave the snow. I learned to ride a bike, listened to Britney Spears and the Spice Girls, ate cookie dough (raw!) and developed my first crush there before we were flooded out of the condo (literally) and after washing ashore on two temporary refuges we washed up (not literally) at a beautiful house on hill. My little brother and I would roam the little forests behind our house while our older brother honed his skateboarding abilities by losing large portions of his knees on gravel and picking up so many deer ticks, I questioned whether there were any left for the rest of us. In school, I was learning about fractions with cookies and Y2K had just been averted when we took a short ride to another very different world.
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| The rough streets of NYC |
Our first NY “home” was a house in the Bronx where we lived at ease for some time before “home” officially meant simultaneously two places – one now beyond the Atlantic Ocean and a few assorted seas and mountains. And even after being reunited after that, “home” permanently became two places and I split my belongings in three: one for the first “home”, one for the second “home” and one for moving.
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| On the move (in California visiting my brother) |
Another six apartments, a few countries and some years later, I was slated to make a place my own “home” which I can’t sincerely say I tried in the brownstone where I first lived or any of the three proceeding college dorms. But I've also visited countless countries and stayed in numerous "homes" across the world in that time.
Now? I’d say I’m somewhere in the spectrum of homeless so I suppose one would only think it natural to say that I might feel ‘homesick.’
But with so many ‘homes’ that I can’t even be certain I haven’t missed one somewhere or counted one twice, I suspect I’m ‘homesick’ for a place I don’t even think exists anywhere but in my head – but whether in memory or in abstraction or in desperation, I can’t tell. I’ve used the word “home” to describe more places than I honestly can or care to remember.
So how am I to know where I want to go back to?
But maybe the question of where I want to go back to is a question more of when. It isn’t a physical location so much as a point in time in my past when my general mood was one which many would associate with safety- what is safer than home? - and would attribute most readily to that rush of relief one feels in that moment when, after a long and tiring journey, one falls backwards onto an unmade bed with faith that the familiar slightly stained comforter, starting-to-un-tuck sheets and drool speckled pillow will catch your descent and embrace your return to where you belong.
Where is “my” bed? Where, if I could choose, would I want to sleep tonight? Or, as speculated previously and as I believe to be more germane to the question I’ve posed, when does this bed exist in the time-space world I’m peering into?
“I think I want to go ‘home,’” I say when I just mean: “Could we please return to the physical location we were prior to the physical location in which we find ourselves in this exact moment?”
I’ve said “I think I want to go home” to nobody in general and about nowhere in general while hosteling in Europe and I haven’t meant any place more significant than the hostel, where I wouldn’t even be able to necessarily locate my assigned bunk, where my welcome would end the instant my funds did and where I certainly wouldn’t have said I felt particularly safe. Except perhaps in relation to the location where I was when I said it.
I’ve asked, “Can you bring this ‘home’ with you?” to the people with whom I’ve crashed and who have generously opened their home (no quotation marks) to me. I’ve speculated about whether we’re missing groceries at a “home” where I feel an intruder. I’ve called hotels, airplane lounges, bars and couches “home.”
I’ve texted, “I’m going home” to be met with “where?” as a response.
What is “home” if it isn’t where family is? The dictionary says home is “the place where one lives permanently, esp. as a member of a family or household.” Despite being the most useless definitions ever to help define where I’m meant to be, it gives us some direction in the quest for an answer.
Does that mean my home is Finland, where my oldest brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and other family live? Is it the United States of America with my father, step-mother and brothers (in which case, Connecticut or New York?)? Could it be in Malawi with my mother (and for how much longer? Does this definition allow for me to include friends-as-good-as-family? And if so, that gives more questions than it provides answers.
Homesick is defined as: “experiencing a longing for one's home during a period of absence from it.” And thus we return to the initial quandary, how can I be homesick without a home? Or is this an entirely mistakenly labeled emotion that isn’t really homesickness but something else altogether?
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