home

where the heart is

Home has morphed into something else, it is a different thing for me now; it carries a new meaning. It has changed with no warning, it did not have the decency to announce its moment of transition suddenly but instead decided to appear in a moment of revelation and beg the question, how did you not notice before?

Recently I returned home and I have to catch myself on whether that implies my trip to Ireland or my journey back to London. Both, I suppose, are as a true as each other. But in the sense that one has always been my home, one has always been the first place that would come to mind when I think of it as an identity, I am beginning to think that my idea of home is starting to shift to another thing and I am uncertain how to feel. I have evolved so much in the little time since I’ve emigrated and my hometown has changed too, the grass beneath my feet introducing itself as a new path, the whispering wind carrying a different tune in its song. Its transformation is one that has pushed in an opposite way to mine.

I returned home to find my longest friends speaking in a language of mortgages I do not understand. A language that feels as foreign to me as Japanese. I returned home to find the bed I’ve spent so many years growing in a different shape to the one I carved myself into. How can that be? It is the same bed; it is the same as it has always been. Except, it no longer is. The weight of its meaning has changed. Which means then, as a fact, that I am not the same as I was. London has sunk its teeth into me and I have moulded myself willingly to its pace and its rhythm. How joyous, how terrifying. I open my mouth and sing its song. I go home and cannot fathom having to wait an hour between each bus to Dublin—sometimes two on a Sunday—because I have gotten so used to being able to leave my London doorstep and being spoiled for choice on getting to wherever it is I desire.

I have shed the skin of my hometown without realising, becoming so accustomed to my new city and my new home that I have forgotten how to entirely exist in the same place I have existed for the majority of my life. A rebirth, a betrayal, torn between the two. I believed that both places could exist as one and the same, and though both can exist as two places I call home, both are not equal. They sit on a balancing scales but one side will always be heavier.

That is not to say that it does not feel like home anymore, because I don’t think that is something that can ever go away, not truly. I miss my family and friends and dogs and think of them often. If anything, moving away has made me ten times more patriotic, as if I have to force myself to maintain my culture. I practice Irish daily on Duolingo despite moaning about it constantly when we were made to study and use it in school. I advocate more for Irish fiction, I crave for a scorching weekend in Stradbally and the messiness that Electric Picnic brings. I bought a Guinness coaster from a trinkety tourist trap in town to bring back to London and I don’t even drink Guinness, I don’t even like the thing.

But in moving to London, I have curated my own new family, my own community. There is love for me here in the city in abundance, just as there is at home in Ireland. There is a thrilling feeling at the thought of losing myself in this city’s embrace. I walk in the street with an assurance that this is exactly where I’m meant to be. It is alluring to be enraptured by this city’s freedom—it is a city that is so terribly easy to love. A city that can take time to settle and to find your place; a city that can chew you up and spit you out; a city in which you need the drive and ambition to keep up with.

But it is also a city of opportunity, of community, of identity. It is a city that feels unbearably rewarding when it finally feels like home.