Belonging

I used to say home is where the heart is! meaning that I belong with the people I love. But where do I belong now that the people I love are scattered across time and continents? Where will I feel at home when pieces of me are far? Sometimes I wish I’d never left at all, that I’d traded my curiosity for complacency, married my college boyfriend and settled for a predictable, mostly happy life. 

A quote from my favorite podcast floats through my head: repaso momentos de mi vida, momentos importantísimos, donde estuve feliz y rodeado de gente que yo quería, y luego me doy cuenta que, en algunos casos, no he visto a esos amigos en una década. O más. Y eso que mi gente, mi generación, aún no ha comenzado a morir.” 

Or in English: “I recall moments of my life, the most important moments, where I was happy and surrounded by the people I loved, and later I realized that, in some cases, I haven’t seen those friends in a decade. Or more. And that my people, my generation, have not yet begun to die.”

I think of this quote a lot—a reminder that life is short and time gets away from us. It’s been years since I’ve seen the people who are the most important to me. My siblings are growing, marking milestones and building their lives without me. And I without them. I’ve graduated from university (I call it university now instead of college), I’ve moved countries yet again, started my career, celebrated countless little milestones, faced and overcome a thousand setbacks. Was all this personal growth worth the sacrifices I’ve made to get it? 

I don’t know if this particular angst will ever go away; on the contrary, I suspect it will only deepen with time. In time my siblings will find partners and have children and those people will largely be strangers to me as my aunts who lived far from me in childhood were strangers. If I stay, I will yearn for not only my family but also the place that I am native to—scorchingly humid lazy Arkansas summers spent swimming in jewel toned lakes and rivers framed by streaked karst bluffs; the gentle rolling Ozark and Ouachita mountains blanketed in deciduous forest. If I return to this, I give up the friends and the life I’ve made here. I will take myself from a place I have fallen in love with and put down roots in. I have irrevocably changed and there is no denying that. If I were to return, part of me would never be home. If I stay, part of me will still never be home.

No one told me it would be this way, no one warned me. Maybe it’s selfish of me to want to have it all, to live the best of all the lives I’ve had. Maybe this is just the price I pay for the beautiful experiences I’ve filled my life with. The privilege of this internal debate is not lost on me: I know how lucky I am to have traveled and fallen in love with a land that is not my own. I know what my mother would say—stop whining and do some work. For once I’m going to take her advice. I’m going to close my laptop and go outside to dig up the garden to plant my potatoes and tomatoes and watermelon under the glorious baby blue New Zealand sky that I love so much.