Homecoming

“Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”

Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

The flight back to Scotland from Hong Kong is long: a cramped 15 hour slog over the breadth of Asia and up through Europe. I am fortune to have long-since developed the ability to sleep almost anywhere, so I get what amounts to a full night’s sleep, if a little broken. It won’t help with the days of jet lag that will follow; if anything, it adheres me to the wrong timezone a little longer. 

Heathrow Airport at five in the morning is quiet, darkness cloaking the empty wing of the terminal as I settle in to wait for my connection. I have no real sense of where I am; of what day it is, what time. For now, all I have to do is to finish this mammoth journey back to my parents’ house in the northeast of Scotland.

My parents are, of course, not home—themselves in South America for another week, because the apple does not fall far from the tree. The house is cold but my mum has left food in the freezer and fresh sheets on my bed. It is familiar. It is a kind of home—for now anyway.

I have a week to myself to reacclimatise. I sleep poorly, falling asleep too early and waking up in the middle of the night. I unpack and sort out all my belongings, because it is something I can do. I don’t know how to process much further than that.

There were so many times on the road that I dreamed of this moment: of coming back home, of being able to stop moving for a bit. Not least in the last few months, so desperately far away from familiarity, through the days where I wanted nothing but a a bowl of pasta, a bed I knew, and the cry of the seagulls in the morning.

Now that I’m here, I’m not sure what to do with it. I deal with it by making myself far too busy, far too quickly. I run through the persistent rain to a relentless schedule of films and spin classes. I accept a ridiculous deadline and churn out two-thirds of a novel in just over a week. I become what my mother (mostly with affection) refers to as a kotitonttu—a house elf—as I bustle around, cooking, cleaning up, finding any manner of task to busy myself with.

I think I’m afraid to sit still too long because then I have to realise the reality of the blank slate before me. When I’d spoken about it, it had all seemed so easy: I’d come back, get a job in Copenhagen, find an apartment. I’d be gone by the spring, probably earlier.

But there comes reality, rearing its ugly head again. And the reality is that the job market is sinking, rental prices are soaring, and I have a niche set of skills that AI filters don’t like. Job applications disappear into the abyss. One day after the other comes, each exactly like the one before. 

I’ve never been good at stagnation.

Perhaps the hardest part of all is that after being persistently on the move, returning home should have felt like finally coming into land. Except it doesn’t, because I am still as transient as ever. I am still temporary. This isn’t where I stay. This isn’t my city. This isn’t my house. This one small bedroom isn’t even mine anymore except for the storage bins of clothes and a stack of books leaning against the wall.

I am still a woman with everything she owns crammed into a selection of boxes and suitcases—the only difference now is that I have nowhere next to go. Not yet, anyway.

Fortunately, I’ve become very good at building a temporary home. A schedule. A life, in places that aren’t mine. I did it over and over last year, in places I adored and in places I abhorred. In places where I was out often with a circle of friends, and in places where I was as lonely as I’ve ever been.

I know I can do this, because I have months of experience to draw on. I just wish I didn’t have to anymore.

For now, this is where I’ll be. Watching every film that comes out because the cinema has always been a sanctuary in the difficult times. Writing as much as I can, not for productivity’s sake, but to give me some sense of purpose. Of promise, even, that there’s something else after this.

Coming home has been a slow process, and I’m not sure it’s through yet. Last year feels like this strange dream: a life that belongs to some different version of myself. One I can somehow both miss everyday and yet never want to return to at that scale.

Some days it feels like there’s no tomorrow. But the dawn will always come. We keep going.