What Makes a Place Home

I think of this question often: What makes a place feel like home?
I’ve moved a good amount of times in my life, some moves by choice, some not. As a child, I had to adapt quickly to being the new kid and quickly making new friends. I’m used to the different phases of being somewhere new. Excitement, disorientation, loneliness, comfort, love/hate, normalcy. The loneliness phase is often the hardest to combat because it’s a given that if you move somewhere completely new, you’re not going to have a giant circle of friends. And in my case, I’ve always moved while single so I’ve never had a boyfriend to soften the blow. There’s beauty in the aloneness though because you learn so much more about yourself when it’s just you, yourself, and your thoughts.
I’ve always been very restless and I tend to not stay in any one place for too long. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they asked “what are you running from?” but I think it’s less what I’m running from and more what I’m running toward. I’m always thinking the next place will feel more like home. That I will finally feel that feeling that I assume others feel when they’re ready to settle down and buy a house somewhere, start a family, and put down roots. If I’m honest, maybe those things scare me. Maybe I like the ability to get up and leave somewhere if I want to and that is easiest when you aren’t tied to a person or a mortgage.
It haunts me a bit to think that maybe no place will ever really feel like home for me. It’s funny there is that app that everyone has become obsessed with, the Pattern. Even my pattern says,
“It may feel like you’re continually being forced to confront your fear that there’s no safe place or home for you in this world…you may rebel against more conventional ideas of home… you may be afraid that if you settle down and fall into a more traditional routine, you’ll be trapped and confined and lose your sense of power and security.”
Hi, hello, that’s me to a T.
And yet I do yearn for those feelings of home. When I first moved to Los Angeles from Orange County (a comparatively small move but big enough that my new relationship felt like a long-distance one thanks to L.A. traffic), I hated it. I hated the lack of small comforts that I was used to having in Orange County, like parking lots you don’t have to pay for. One time I got so overwhelmed trying to find street parking that wasn’t a mile away from a restaurant I wanted to go to (and reading street signs with ten million time frames for when you could and could not park there) that I just left and drove home. And granted these are small, small things. I am painfully aware that this screams FIRST WORLD PROBLEM. Don’t @ me please.
But I’ve realized that it is all these small things that make a place feel like home. It’s the coffee shops you frequent, your local grocery store, the familiar faces you get used to seeing when you’re walking down the street, the routes you take everyday to get to work/school/your favorite restaurant, your local group of friends, and the things you take for granted because they’re so part of your normal routine that you don’t even notice them anymore. And you don’t realize those are the things that make a place feel like home until you don’t have them anymore. By the end of my stay in LA, I loved it and it pained me to leave. Walking down Larchmont Blvd, grabbing coffee from Go Get Em Tiger, (the best) sandwiches from Larchmont Wine and Cheese, ice cream from Salt and Straw, stopping to look at magazines at the media stand, and walking around Hancock Park became some of my greatest joys. These are the small things that cost next to nothing but become part of your everyday life. I miss seeing the Hollywood Sign on my walks and thinking how lucky I was that most people dream of being there and I got to call LA my home.
It took me nearly two months to get to the loneliness phase here in Madrid. The first two months I walked around with such wide-eyed enthusiasm that there was no room for any other feeling. There is so much to love in this gorgeous city… the architecture, buñuelos, tapas, the fashion, buñuelos, Parque Buen Retiro, tinto de verano, buñuelos (okay, you get that I love them I think). But the expat blues finally did hit me when the excitement faded, right around the two month mark which also happened to be my birthday. I missed my friends and my normal comforts (hello giant American coffee and iHop breakfasts). I ended up crying during a beautiful sunset in Toledo with my very confused friend wondering what the hell happened (because I was obviously not crying over the sunset). I was partly sad for what felt like no reason, partly sad because my dating life has been a bit of a disaster here, and the largest part was guilt over daring to be sad when I’m in such a beautiful place that I feel like I should be nothing but joyful over. But that isn’t reality and the loneliness eventually hits you. As an expat, you’re never more alone and the distance begins to claw at you. You get used to being up at odd hours just to talk to family and friends, you fight with friends because you don’t have face-to-face conversations to soften the miscommunications that so often happen through text, and you don’t have anyone here to truly make you feel less alone.
Right now I still feel like an outsider and I think it will take a long time for that to go away. My Spanish needs to improve dramatically so I can start to have the more complex conversations I desire to have, and I need to find a group of Spaniards to hangout with so I feel more like a local. I don’t know yet if I’m staying beyond my planned year in Madrid. Right now I’m thinking of going to Mexico City followed by Washington, D.C. (yes, again) but then again life can change. Maybe I meet the love of my life here, settle down, and have cute Spanish babies. (Sorry mom, ignore this part. It’s not likely to happen anyway.)
Honestly who knows, life can change in an instant… but I hope I’m able to confront my fear of settling down because I dream of the day where I stand in my doorway and tell myself, “welcome home.”
