I’m not sure when this quest for home begun but it’s older than I can remember.
Where is home? What it is? How do you even recognize it?
And if you do, how do you become someone that can inhabit it?
Just like our physical bodies are a crystallization of our energy, so is our home. You can tell a lot about someone just by looking at their home.
It had never occurred to me that it was odd to have a hole in the middle of your house. It sounds quite obvious when you put it like that, but what if it has always been there? Can you really notice it?
My childhood home had a well in the living room.
My apartment in Berlin had a hidden sink in the living room.
Then Japan. The bathroom sinks were now openly visible in the living room.
They all had a hole in the center.
And so did my body.
It wasn’t until I saw it in the Airbnb that the pattern became visible.
But was this inherited architecture or reality? My family had lived in houses with holes. They also had a hollow chest. None of this was something I chose consciously.
And why were the places I inhabited so small and asymmetrical?
The dentist seemed to notice it before I did. I wasn’t looking for it, it just crossed my path. It never occurred to me that my mouth was still not balanced. My whole body started to shift.
A mouth where the tongue crowded over the teeth. A small apartment where the bed nearly touched the ceiling. Both suddenly finding space.
But is having space the same as occupying the space?
I now wonder, why would you have a knife that does not cut, pillows that are uncomfortable, or a sofa with a color you hate? And yet that’s how I lived for a long time.
I never let myself feel comfortable in the apartment in Berlin, always thinking it was a temporary place. I grew up hearing “This is my home, not yours. One day you will have yours.”
Yes, one day I will have mine.
My home. One day.
When?
I ended up living there for four years.
Hanoi might have been the first place where I felt truly comfortable. I walked barefoot. I sat on the couch and not just on the bed. I cooked. I danced. I drank tea on the balcony.
But I never left my island.
Kuala Lumpur opened new horizons. A city where I felt comfortable not just inside. I had my hairdresser, my favorite shops, a park.
I left my island, but I was still the only inhabitant.
Jakarta came as a shock. The world that had expanded my horizons now asked me to contract back into my island. The noise, the pollution, the hovering fear, all beckoning to stay inside.
But how do you go back to being small?
Returning to Lisbon, to my childhood neighborhood, was surprisingly a welcome change. The school, the park, the shops, I used to go to as a kid, now being witnessed from a new perspective. I could breathe.
I started leaving my belongings behind when my parents got divorced. Some belongings were in one house, some were in other, and I lived with a suitcase. As I moved to Berlin I left things in Lisbon, as I travelled to Asia I left things in Berlin and Switzerland. As I returned to Lisbon I felt scattered.
It was not only me living in other people’s containers, it was also my belongings.
So how can you hold a place when you cannot even hold your things?
An anchor.
My anchor took the shape of a storage unit. A place that was mine, and that could hold all my belongings. Slowly my things started arriving from all the places I had left them. The day I got the last piece I felt a shift. I felt the gravity.
Then came the car. A car is not something I would immediately recognize as an anchor, it moves after all. But it can also contain my things. And me. And even take us places. I can be anchored and still be free to move.
Roots and freedom can coexist.
But where?
In dreams and astral traveling, I live in many places. I never ask if I can live there, or who’s place that is. I’m just there.
So why do I ask for permission here? An application. Proof of capacity. Evaluation. Waiting. And eventually—access revoked.
It took me a while to make the decision to stay in my friend’s apartment in Lisbon, but by the time I had made up my mind, it had already been promised to someone else.
Forced to leave. Again.
Why is the world punishing me?
No, wait.
Why am I the one recreating this pattern over and over again? And how do I stop doing it?
I became so good at leaving that I started letting go even before being pushed.
You. Don’t. Move. Me.
Not anymore.
As I had to leave the last Airbnb I decided to overstay. I grabbed a huge rock and I just sat there. Eight hours, holding a rock. No phone, no book.
Present.
Anyone who has ever trained flexibility knows there is a moment the body just lets go. Fine, I’ll stretch, it says. It felt similar. The first hours I could feel myself just taking up space.
Uncomfortable.
Two hours. Three hours. Four hours. Eight hours. And then it didn’t matter anymore. I left because I wanted to, but with the feeling of what holding feels like.
The intuition came overnight.
A pull. A desire. A curiosity.
Just drive there.
On the outside it might have looked like a fool’s errand. I certainly felt like one. I had spent my life searching for my home, would I really find it in a four-day spontaneous trip?
“Say you have a little faith in me
Just close your eyes and let me lead
Follow me home
Need to have a little trust in me
Just close your eyes and let me lead
Follow me home
To where the lonely ones roam”
A shuffling playlist. The lyrics caught my attention as I arrived to the city I now call home.
I might have known all along that I felt home here, I just never listened. It didn’t fit the ideas I had about what it should be.
Resonance.
Easy. Fluid. Non compromising.
It was the first time I didn’t want to leave.
I think home means something different to everyone, but right now to me it means a place that can hold the whole of me and that I can keep returning to.