What is home? We will surely end up with a varied selection of ideas about “home” depending on whom we ask. For example, a young person would probably link it to the idea of that first home they had with their family. Later in life, she or he might attach it to the home they’ve built with their partner. Alternatively, that same person may have a third concept of home relating to the place where they are and even to the place where they dream of being.
Young people may conceive of the home as a project that is constantly being updated, a road that is built and traveled throughout their lives. But what do young migrants feel when they’ve had to leave their places of birth, their first homes, where everything was known and near to them?
When most of us think about our home, what first pops up in our minds are the people
who live there, the ones we love the most, isn’t it? But what if they were left behind, far away, distant, absent from our lives? For so many migrants, answering this question is a painful act that freezes the blood, fills the eyes with tears, and makes the voice break when trying to summon a response.
What is home? I have asked myself this question after a great deal of silent thought.
Three concepts arise in my mind:
- Home is certainly not merely real estate, but should also be a place of comfort and spiritual consolation.
- Home is where dreams, and dreamers, are protected and safe.
- Home is, at least potentially, a happiness machine.
In thinking about these concepts, my mind wanders to my own experience of home, and to the house that sheltered me for many years, where my children were born, and where step by step we grew up as individuals and as a family. What does my house think of us after so much absence and so much emptiness?
Surely it will remember the last day we were there, our fear of simply being there, not to mention the greater fear of emigration – not merely leaving our house, but leaving our country, our home. It’s an extremely hard step. Surely that house remembers the hugs from relatives and our closest friends who came to see us leave — to be honest, it was only a very few of them, because escaping from your house and home, from your own country, is not exactly news to shout from the rooftops.
I guess our house never understood why we were leaving, even though it saw all the horrors we experienced the day our youngest son was shot, saw the terror of feeling intimidated, and accused because of not having the same opinion as the “majority.” Our brave decision to leave – and it was a brave decision – was motivated by the pursuit of a dream that started as a nightmare, where it was suddenly necessary to start over, to build everything up again. But most of all, it was about living again; it seems you must die to live once more.
It has been said that where we go as a family, the home comes with us. But somehow this simply is not so. It’s just that we connect with a grateful feeling of having been able to get out of that horror, and that is why we call the new country and the new house home. It is something done in order not to feel so uprooted, so depressed, and so lonely. Homesickness traps me in the walls of a house that still has a long way to go to become a home. That homesickness tortures me with memories and always takes me back, not letting me see my present life, and is just bearable because of hope for the future.
Day by day, consciously and unconsciously, I make comparisons in everything I see, in all the smells and flavors that are different, in sensations I didn’t perceive clearly before. So many things that were simply part of life and living – of home – and even things that were boring — how dearly I miss all of them. This is how homesickness seizes everything bit by bit.
I was happy and I did not know it; I want to be happy again and I do not know how to do it. I’m sure our old house, abandoned and empty, could understand our escape that December.
Today I ask myself again the same question of “What is home?”, and a pain goes through my chest. It is said that “one who knows about pain, knows about everything.” There is a moment in an immigrant’s life when they do not know what to do with so much pain, facing it every day; nonetheless, it must be the pain itself that teaches us how to live again.
One day you realize that the future is already past, and you wonder and wonder if what you lived was worth it. One day, your children’s children will say, “I think my grandparents were from another country,” oblivious to the pain with which those grandparents built the foundation for them to have a new home, a future. They will never ask themselves whether what the grandparents did was worth it because the answer will already be very foreign; everyone will have built their home on the roots of that forgotten home.