There's No Place Like My Room

Feeling lucky to feel homesick

When I first moved to London, I never felt homesick. I missed my family, and my friends, and Trader Joe’s, but never home. In a way, home never really felt like one, because it seemed like I was always destined to leave. Going back home forced me to ground myself and finally make sense of what makes my hometown a home — strengthened relationships, a curated space, hugs from my family members. It’s something I had to learn as an adult. And now I do miss it.

I arrived at Heathrow at 11:00 on Tuesday morning. I was overcome with the most empty, nauseating feeling for most of the day. I had uprooted my heart and dragged it across the city in the blistering heat, letting it trail behind me from a thin string. I planted it in the rough carpet of my room at home and watered it every day for 18 months, and the change was so stark that its removal was violent. That’s what it felt like. Now it’s sitting in the corner of my Airbnb room, trying to grab onto the unfamiliar soil and build a new home here.

Sara Wanni wrote in her poem “Tomorrow is a Place”:

There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

This poem is a really lovely reflection on time and aging and friendship. But this last bit makes me think of my two selves and the now-obvious split. There was me before I got on a plane, and now there’s me after. There’s not much yet. But there will be. Time is my friend, the third wheel in my relationship with myself.

“Interior at Nice” by Henri Matisse

I feel like I’m floating in an in-between, waiting to place both feet in the same country. This has a lot to do with the fact that I still don’t have a flat to live in, but also just a natural response to moving to a new place without most of your belongings. I long for familiarity. I miss my family and my best friend. I miss my room and my desk — where I did the most growth this year. I’m still getting used to who I’ve become, and I feel like I wasn’t ready to leave the people and places and things that have helped me get here. But I’m reminded that they’ll be there when I return, and I can greet them in the same way I always have.

Here is “The Problem with Travel” by Ada Limón:

Every time I'm in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups-- we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

After leaving for university, the endless possibilities overwhelmed me. I could make a million friends, speak in a different accent, change my name. I could shave my head and dye it green. I did none of those things. Now looking back, I didn’t grow much during my time there (here, then?), because the ultimateum was either drastic growth or no growth at all. I felt pressured to return home and be unrecognizable. But I did most of my growing after the slow realization that I can be happy in the present. I don’t have to change anything. The pandemic allowed me to look at my surroundings, at what I had already, and find the utmost joy in it. To find survival in it. And I did. So I’m thankful to be here, as I am, and I’m ready to move forward, as I am. I’m already excited to go home in December — not to show everyone how much this city has changed me, but how much it hasn’t. I want to see myself in my room, greet it as if it were a mirror.

There is so much hope in possibility. I am anxious for the planting I have yet to do, for the new self I am constantly becoming. But the leaves will change in November, in the way I know they will, and I will have finally settled. I miss home, but I know I can make a home here, too. I can feel my heart trying to grasp onto something. I walk around and the breeze hits me like I am meant to feel it. My body knows that I have been here before, that I have settled here before, but my emotions and my heart haven’t caught up yet. Still, I know they can see the finish line. It’s coming.

Further Reading

Maya Angelou on Home, Belonging, and Growing Up: I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.

“I left home to find home”: The Guardian in conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I think you travel to search and come back home to find yourself there.

On Leaving and Returning: A Reading List About Home: how we can live in a city for decades and still—because we’re from somewhere else—remain unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to shake our outsider’s mentality.

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What I’ve Enjoyed This Week

Recent Reads

• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. This is a short novel about a ghost named Kazu, who haunts the park near Ueno Station, where he spent his last days as a homeless man. In observing those still there, he reflects upon his life and the events that led to his tragic end. He was born in the same year as a Japanese emperor, and Yu Miri uses this juxtaposition to make statements on poverty and class. The book discusses feelings of grief, regret, and vulnerability in a gentle yet straightforward way. The narrative is dreamlike and blends timelines, which can get confusing sometimes but definitely adds to the aura of the story. 4/5

• One of my favorite things about London is the Poems on the Underground. This week I saw this one by Anyte of Tegea:

  Midsummer in the leaves there’s a murmuring breath 
  Among the roots a cold spring bubbles through. 
  Wayfarer, weary to death, here is kindness to spare. 
  Earthly, heavenly, as the tree lives, so may you. 

  This is an epigraph from The Greek Anthology translated by David Constantine. I normally avoid ancient poems, but this one stuck with me. I was actually on my way to walk through Hyde Park with a friend. It was cloudy in the morning but the sunlight flickered through the leaves and the fountain was running. I found myself thinking of this poem.

Other Wonderful Things

• Walking. I love walking. Back at home, even during quarantine, I didn’t walk much. Views of my suburban neighborhood grew tiring very quickly and I longed for a change in scenery. I have walked more in the past 3 days than I have in the past 18 months. It has been so good for my mental health, even in the typical London gloom. My body is sore but I am so happy.

• I’ve been re-watching Sex Education before the third season comes out and I am now reminded why it is my favorite show on Netflix. It’s funny and lighthearted yet still touches so deeply on serious themes. The characters are well-rounded and loveable (despite their very human flaws). I often think high school shows are overdone, inaccurate, and just…bad, mostly. But this is the best one I’ve seen since Freaks and Geeks. Though it is very, uh, raunchy. Keep in mind.

• On Friday I visited the Aesop Queer Library in Soho. The company purchased over 3500 volumes of LGBTQ+ literature from Gay’s the Word in Bloomsbury and a further 1500 were donated by Penguin Random house. They were split between Aesop stores in Soho and Borough — anyone who visited left with a free book of their choice from the curated collection. (I picked “In The Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado.) It amplifies queer voices and makes literature more accessible, and it’s the coolest initiative I’ve seen by a company in a while. I hope to see more things like this in the future.

Thanks for reading!

<3

Tara