be/longing

thoughts on having two places to call home.

I have lived long enough in two separate places to know I will never live fully in either. Wherever I go, there is a hollow gap, a held breath. The wish for roots to fully spread, for seeds to drop and produce more blooms than before.

I used to think home was a singular place, a tree bound with roots into loamy soil, that housed hummingbirds and grew mushrooms from dead limbs. Now, I know it is the eternal calling through the branches, a begging to come back. Mycelium branches, spread across every continent, every country you’ve been excited to come back to. No central hub, no nest, just a web of everything you’ve loved.

Each day I am reminded of the home I first knew, among the astringent eucalyptus leaves. Where the sun was my oldest friend, the ocean a healing reprieve. Nestled among the birdsong of the rainbow galahs.

Whenever my feet land back onto the golden soil, it hits me with full force — the remnants, the reminders. That this version of home is not entirely mine.

But when I am here, in the home I’ve made, across an ocean among the pine trees, under the shadow of volcanoes, I know this is not for me either. This isn’t where I can blossom into lushness, but it might be where I can seek the light for a period of time. For now, where the seasons are vivid and the landscape is rugged, I’ve found a quiet place to nestle myself into.

And here lies the turmoil.

Pulled between the two spaces — between a home I belonged to, and a place I belong, when neither of them feel like a place to stay long enough to take a deep exhale. To let go of the stale air that has been festering in my lungs since I first learned that the world was much bigger than the roads I drove daily, the sky I would watch painted in crimson and violet.

Belonging has become a kind of hunger in my life, a dull ache — like the growing pains in childhood. I am always seeking respite, in something, or somewhere that feels like coming home for the first time. Where I might rest my head on the pillow, without the remains of a ghost to remind me of all I’ve left behind, of all I’ve got ahead.

No matter where my body sleeps, my heart is still awake somewhere else, yearning for a life I cannot touch.

Nostalgia for the things I’ve never lived, the lives I cannot have. That do not belong to me or at least, to this version of me.

Longing to belong, to be, to exist in the liminal space between the impossible sadness of a split heart and worlds an ocean away.