There are days when I feel like I chose this life. And others where I feel totally disconnected. You relate?
When I was a month old, I crossed oceans and became the weirdest privileged immigrant case I’ve heard of. Born in Europe from parents of two totally different citizenships than my birthplace. My father literally ran to the US Embassy the week I was born to make sure I had a place to ‘call home’ on paper. And so the ‘where are you from’ understanding started to get muddy.
We flew back and forth between continents until I was set-up proper in boarding school and frilled British dresses. Eventually we landed in the US again, this time with a hell of an accent and feverish need to cut every food imaginable with a silver shined knife and fork.
We moved more times than my years on Earth. My parents naturally instilling a sense of adventure in the weavings of my inherited lifestyle. As if passing down the nomadic colours in my intricate tapestry of life, I grew to be excited when my parents told me at the dinner table we were moving again. So much that in the last five years of my adult life, I’ve willingly moved to more than six states and over a dozen places.
Where is home I wonder. Is it where my Pops calls home? How about where my Nanay is originally from? No, it’s where I graduated college right? Or was that high school? My heart seems to reject the answers I vomit from stranger to stranger.
And then.
Last night I was scrolling through photos with my parents. The locations were all over the place. Death Valley, CA. Quito, Ecuador. Long Beach. Olympic National Forest, WA. Puerto Vallarta. Rome, Italy. Florida. Colorado. Arizona. Oregon. Gulf of Mexico. Big Island. Hawai’i. After reveling in the memories, we realized - we are fucking vagabonds.
The screens were filled with rental properties, hotels, airbnbs, homes of friends and family and a smathering of a bottom unit of a motel my parents have owned and updated throughout the years. No single place could we agree on as ‘home’. The laughter quickly filled the silence as we each recalled our biased versions of adventure.
And then, I took a moment to look around me.
My Pops to my right. Laughing in jest of himself at approximately 327 photos of him asleep all over the world. My Nanay to my left. Drinking her water and reminiscing of our rain filled trip to Seattle and watching herself dangerously record a birthday message to her husband while driving down the highway. She even managed to take photos with bedazzled sunglasses on a countdown timer in the same instance. And my boys calmly laying on the floor beside us. Muscles happy from the morning jaunt to the beach. It was right there, wasn’t it? I had it. Hell, we had it. We had home all along.
Home has become synonymous with connection for me. That feeling of being connected to something deeper than a mortgage. That can transcend any number of miles, travel delays, language barriers and time changes. It’s a feeling inside me that I can carry with my anywhere. And one that my loved ones can too.
And if we pay attention enough, the connection we carry individually becomes one.
Enter my story below. Here are two photos, different angles of the same place.
I discovered this mural in a plaza in Puerto Vallarta. It was out of our regular path, and I felt compelled to touch it and interact with it as if I’d been there before. I can’t explain the pose, I like to take any chance I can to show my tongue (details of why that is a thing for me on my next blog). I enjoyed tracing my fingers over the mosaic, the whirring sounds of the city center blanketing my special moment.
Recently, last night, sandwiched between my parents and slumbering boys - I saw a familiar image on my parents photo memories. A city center. Not any city center. The same center and same mosaic wall. Turns out, adventures took them there exactly two years earlier. To. The. Day.
We always seem to find our way home, even if we don’t realize it.
Home, it’s a funny thing right?
