Member-only story
What home feels like
I know I’m home when the barista in the cafe I work from every day greets me. It’s the way in which she does. I’m often the first person when the cafe opens, ordering my usual long black. She starts her day with me and I start my day with her.
We exchange comments about the weather and how I’m dressed in super warm layers and she’s wearing a crop top. We laugh and I go to open my laptop. I dig into my tasks for the day, sipping coffee the taste of which is funnily familiar by now.
I brought home with me here, to Scotland. I felt at home in a few places before. But this is the longest I stayed somewhere since I moved out of my hometown.
That’s actually not true. But it feels like that.
I survived covid here. I learned to be alone here. I learned how to love, see myself as an adult, take responsibility. get scared witout disappearinginto the abbyss.
Edinburgh is a foreign place that, over the years, I came to call home. It’s a spiritual home, full of possibility.
I know I’m home when the streets I walk every day feel so familiar I find them boring.
I know I’m home when almost each day, I bump into a familiar face in the street or at a cafe.
I know I’m home when I can get so lost in my routines that I almost forget what life’s really all about.
I know I’m home when I go to bed tired but smiling, knowing that I’ve lived another ordinary day of my life as well as I could.
I’m home whenever I stay long enough to grow root. This is me bridging gaps between what I know to be true and what I can still find out.
