On feeling at home
“Příští stanice: Náměstí Míru.”
The lady’s voice on the overhead speaker of the tram has become as familiar to me as my mother’s. It’s soft but full of authority. When I hear her announce the name of my stop, I feel my nerves start to calm a little bit. It’s not that I’m anxious traveling about Prague so much anymore — I’ve been here nearly two months now and would like to think I know my way around quite well — but there’s something reassuring in that voice when I hear it. Yes, it’s robotic and devoid of any human emotion. Yes, it sounds the same at every stop. But as soon as I hear Náměstí Míru, or even I.P. Pavlova, the stop before mine — I know it. I know that I am as close to home as I ever will be here.
I am 5,222 miles away from Seattle. I am 5,941 miles away from Los Angeles. Let me be clear. I’m not homesick. As much as this semester resembles freshman year, it is not. I have grown leaps and bounds since my first year of college, much in the way of my independence, and while I do sometimes miss people and places… it’s a rare moment when I find myself longing for home. Now that I am halfway across the world in a country I hadn’t given a second thought to a year ago, I still wouldn’t say I’m homesick. I miss small comforts, tiny familiarities, but I wouldn’t say I have an intense desire to return to Seattle or Los Angeles anytime soon. What I would say is that I think I subconsciously want to feel at home here… but instead I mostly just feel without a home at all. Homeless.
It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it? Being 21, being in my twenties. I’m sure most anyone my age can relate — or at least anyone as privileged as I know I am. We all come from some place, or multiple places, and land in yet another to spend four years of our lives for the sheer purpose of studying whatever subject is of our choosing. We hop from one home, and as I’ve certainly done in the past three years, create another for ourselves. But now that I’m here in Prague, I wonder why it is that we do this. I know it must be a human instinct, to adapt to our changing environments, but at the same time I think doing it too many times can have the opposite effect. We latch onto our surroundings to give us grounding, to make us feel on top of a world with a whole lot of territory that we admittedly haven’t conquered in the slightest. But what actually happens — or, I should say, what seems to be happening to me — is that I lose that sense of comfort I thought I left at my home base. It’s like the magic carpet I’ve walked on my entire life has been swept out from under me.
Seattle isn’t all warm and fuzzies, and neither is Los Angeles by any means. And it isn’t because these places themselves are changing, because even if they are with time, fundamentally these cities are the same as I left them. It’s me that’s changing and it’s me that’s making them imperfect in my mind, because as I grow older I realize that I will not always belong in the way that I once did. I’ve always been told that being in your twenties is one of the best times of your life — your prime — and I get why people say that, I do. But what they never told me was that with this young, reckless, experimental age also comes a severely distorted notion of home and what it means to feel centered. I grew up knowing exactly where (0,0) was on the coordinate grid that was my life but since coming to college, and now coming abroad, I couldn’t tell you where that point is anymore. I know where I started, sure, but one day not too many years from now my parents will sell our house and my childhood that came with it will be a distant memory.
Is “home” supposed to be just that? Does it have to be a place we can return to and always belong, by definition? I look at the people I see on the subway, in the streets, at restaurants and cafés every day here and I wonder to myself if they call this city home. What is Prague to them? I look at their faces and their mannerisms and try to decipher them, try to figure out if they’re a native or a foreigner. Were they born and raised here? Did they move here recently? Are they taking classes at Charles University? Are they in transit, coming or going? Are they an expat, looking to make Prague their new hometown? Do they get homesick for another place far from here?
I wonder. I also wonder what it’s like for those kids who move around their whole lives because their parents have jobs that relocate them on a regular basis. Have they always been prone to feeling this numbness I feel now? I no longer find solace in places in the same way that I used to, so it seems… and I’ve only really spent a significant amount of time in three cities now. The closest feeling to home for me these days comes in the form of people and not places. It is my family that keeps grounded, perhaps because as much as I change… I know they’ll always keep up. Seattle, LA, Prague — I don’t know that they can or ever will do that for me. I don’t know that I can trust these cities to be what I’ve always known them to be, or maybe more precisely to be what I need them to be upon my return.
