Home?

One of the perks of being a full-year student at DIS was not having to say goodbye to Copenhagen as early as other students. However, my decision to move to a different housing for next semester (Outdoor LLC: read Shantika’s blog entry) combined with having to say goodbye to my friends, felt like I was also finishing another chapter in my life. A chapter I will be revisiting over and over for the rest of my life. 

The feeling of saudade —the Portuguese word for bittersweetness—crept in the last two days of the semester for me. I think most of us were so busy with finals, assignments, and trips that we did not realize that the time had arrived. The day before I left Copenhagen for the break, I presented a poster at the DIS Festival with my group.

Can you see how ecstatic I am to stand next to our brain collage poster?

I have never seen the Student Hub that festive and vibrant. It was the perfect opportunity to see everyone I met throughout the semester and talk about the wonderful memories we made. It was all fun and exciting until I realized that I had to say bye to these people. The sadness was inevitable of course but on the same day, I had a conversation with a friend that helped me embrace this reality. 

My friend and I attended an international boarding school and lived abroad before, so we were both familiar with leaving our families and having to say goodbye to friends and places. That day, we talked about the difficulty of saying bye to friends. Then, she asked me what “home” meant to me. I had not thought about the meaning of home in a long time and it seemed irrelevant at that point.

I gave myself a couple of seconds to think through that question and these thoughts rushed through my mind:

The home was a physical space at first, the house I spent my childhood in, which changed when I moved abroad for the first time.

After that, the home was all about the people I care about. Complying with the cliches, I thought “Home is wherever I am with the people I love.” I was right to some extent but I think I have a different conception of home now.

Home is the memories I make with people, at a given time and space. It is the sense of comfort and security I feel when I recall those memories. Of course, seeing my loved ones does create a feeling of home, but it’s never the home I remember before meeting them.

Like our personalities, the feeling of home is not static. It’s an ever-evolving dynamic concept shaped and built up by people, spaces, and our experiences overall. Therefore, my experience in Copenhagen and the people I met are a part of that feeling of home I will carry with me forever.

After my stream of consciousness, I tried to explain my understanding of home to my friend. She was reminded of a quote from Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I sympathize with this quote nowadays.

“You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?”

He laughed. “Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it.”

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

In a similar vein, a touching movie I watched recently, Past Lives, had a quote that I try to remind myself often.

“If you leave something behind, you gain something too”

Past Lives

I hope these thoughts are as comforting to you as they are to me —if not too confusing.