Homecoming

There’s safety and comfort in the idea that there are certain things in life that remain constant. Home, for instance. Regardless of how drastically our worlds alter or falter, we can depend on the consistency of Home to salvage the shreds of our lives. It’s therapeutic, like a masseuse for the soul. There’s a reason that, in times of chaos, we return to the place that molded our original routines. Going Home restores that sense of balance, and buoys the illusion that our lives aren’t nearly as fucked up as we thought they were, simply because constancy is so dependable.

I flew home to New York last week for a few days, and I’ve never been so happy. There are things about New York – Home – that are simply irreplaceable, and the mere notion of reuniting with the aggressive cabbies and the avenues flanked with skyscrapers had me feeling, in a word, found. Most of all, I was itching to see my friends and restart the relationships that were put on pause since I left for London.

From the beginning of my homecoming, however, it was made explicitly clear that despite that the physical Home – the one that is unique to each of us, that we have and know and love – remains stagnant, the rest of the world does not. Cultures evolve, scenarios change, and like the good products of our environments that we are, we also must adjust to fit into our surroundings. People move forward with their lives, and they relocate and get jobs and find somebody to love. And though I struggled in making the realization, I knew it was unrealistic to expect others to keep me as a top priority forever.

I anticipated that my trip home would be as if it were any other weekend I spent in New York before I came to London: mornings with Bloody Marys downtown and evenings at glamorous restaurants followed by Frat-type bars in Murray Hill, where we would laugh at the irony when we inevitably order martinis. But if I’ve learned anything that I should’ve learned from my last post, expectations are atom bombs of disappointment. And for my friends and me, this is a time in our lives where the only thing that is constant is the fact that nothing is constant. I came to New York and wanted everything to be exactly the same as before, but I lost sight of the fact that everything had changed. And though I am living abroad, by myself, being an adult, there were parts of me that were still fiercely clutching aspects of my life that existed only in my childhood, in college; in places where I was stagnant but never knew.

In that lies the appeal in going Home: because we’ve created worlds that are furiously spinning and we’ve forced our lives to organize inside the centrifuge; Home lies on the outskirts of that force and remains unaffected. But hard as it is to swallow, the Home we think of may only be a physical thing: it may only be the house you grew up in, the home cooked meals, your very own bed – because Home is a state of mind, and therefore, is relative. And I’ve come to find that Home is not where the heart is, but rather, where you make it. So, yes – Home is comforting. But I find more comfort in the fact that you can build Home around you... wherever you are.

So in the meantime, I’m homeless. And though that may sound discouraging, I’m still hopeful. Because all of this, physically and emotionally, is temporary. And, when I look around, I have to be grateful that presently my Home is a gorgeous flat on Kensington High Street, in one of the world’s most exciting cities, and not a sidewalk, even with the same address.