On the concept of home during uncertain times

Sara Rodríguez

There is a phrase that my friends and I constantly reference in a satirical way. Home, I’m going home. It is not a reference to any specific movie or show but rather a cliché of what a main character says in the back of a taxi. The hero’s journey takes said protagonist and puts them out of their comfort zone. After the travel, they comes back home. But the home has changed – or at least, they have.

Whenever I take a cab back to my current house in Krakow, it feels strange. I almost already know the way back to that place. Not much more than half a year has passed but the faces have, the stories, the emotions and it seems like it is a new place each day.  Some places in Madrid, my birthplace, my city, are deeply haunted and probably always will be. Streets which name I won’t dare say or bars where I met someone I had to (un)know. It is funny how the same tragedy akin to bittersweet memories has started to paint Krakow not red, but a myriad of colours that do not exactly match to one another.

I look in the mirror sometimes, my head still in December, in the beginning of university, in my own high school experience and even back in primary school, childlike wonder ever present. It is hard to make sense out of the scattered puzzle pieces. I need to remind myself of this, time and time again: Despite everything, it’s still you. Whatever that means.

There are many things I thought I would have forgotten about by now. Seeing high school students with bright smiles, messing around or having deep conversations in the middle of the hallway constantly makes me aware (and sometimes weary) of my age. Some of my fellow volunteer friends I have met in this journey, ones are fresh out of high school and others are already 30 – a dreaded number by all of us who see our 20s slipping away at a rapidly and dizzying rate. I am in the middle of it all, a university degree starting to collect dust but a future that is not drawn out yet, at what time do we have to stop dreaming about what we will be when we grow up?

My brother turns 18 next week, June the 2^nd. I still remember how it felt to hold him as a baby. Now he is taller than me. You must relearn time and time again how to be a friend, a sister or a daughter as time goes by, you grow older, you move places, etc… Life does not stop for you to take in the greatness of a millisecond or of a face that will ever so slightly be different tomorrow than today. As a great writer once scribbled on the wall of a mental institution; Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it. This always rang true for me, so I wonder where my obsession with living abroad came for, the preparedness to leave the comfortable nest. Anytime I talk about my family or friends to the people I meet here I see the colourful life I left behind. As Holden Caulfield once said, don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Last week of September, right before I came to live in Poland for a year, I introduced the boy I was seeing then to my friend group. On the way back, we were in his car and he asked me, completely oblivious to my perspective, why would I ever want to leave Madrid, with such caring friends, loving family and open opportunities – a big city with comfortable smiles to look at. I thought the question was ridiculous at the time. Now I wonder what my answer really is. They say home is not a place but a person. If it were my friend, I would have a home ripped away in parts all over the European map. One of my best friends lives now in Bucharest. Another one in Munich – which I will visit soon. Not a poet or novelist, but a singer, stated; „Home is where your heart is,” but what a shame ’cause everyone’s heart doesn’t beat the same.

The heart-wrenching We’ll always have Paris turned into Prague for me after my Erasmus semester, into actual Paris for a dear goodbye I once had to say and finally now into Krakow. It is hard to let go of home, sometimes even harder to let go of a new home. Attachment breeds heartbreak, like a teacup that is already shattered in the future you need to enjoy every moment with it for it will have an end.

For evolution, the context has to change, adaptation, integration, mixing of cultures. In our Dworek TV, the volunteers from integrART9 we discussed how travelling is almost a medicine, a miracle cure for a myopic and asphyxiating worldview when there’s no window for empathy. In my case, many things about Spain are only visible from the outside. Like the fish that searched for the sea while swimming it. Krakow seems like two cities when I compare the snowy empty Rynek Głowny to the always full and sunny one now. Like two brothers from the same blood, same cradle but different outcomes.

Seasons change and so do people. Sometimes we try to change the world but ended up just changing ourselves – the only thing we have control over if anything. Home is yourself, the only person you always carry, like a snail with their house constantly over their shoulders (even if all those others who contributed to make you who you are have been integrated into the structure). Carrie Bradshaw, my main inspiration whenever I write this sort of essay, ended an episode by saying After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot. Our minds change almost every day, so does our body, the people we love, the things we do, so how can our home not change?