Longing and belonging

Where are you from? Do you find it difficult to answer this?


There are some guesthouses that I frequent. I always end up meeting travellers from far away lands Sometimes, the travellers are from places that I have never been to — such as Iceland or Mongolia. When we talk, a strange kind of feeling takes over, a feeling that has no words to describe in English — can you think of a nice word to describe future nostalgia?

Sometimes the fellow travellers are from places where I have been to, fallen in love in, fallen out of love, fed for free, have seen the season change, shown others around — you can say that I have experienced all that a local would experience. It keeps getting harder for me to say where my home is.

At one such guesthouse, there is a sign that reads “We will not be responsible for the loss of your belongings”. Wouldn't this administrative sign become more fun if I were to replace the last word from “belongings” to “belonging”?