This is a post for all those who had to move out of their parents' place to go to university. If you didn't, you've never had that awkward discussion with yourself about how you use the word 'home'. When I first moved to Melbourne and would tell friends that I'd be "home all weekend, I've got an assignment to finish," they'd pause for a moment and then ask, "Home in Melbourne or home in the country?" The dual-locality of my existence was too confusing for them to handle. I had to define my terminology; which one was 'home'.
Now, as an exchange student and ex-patriot Australian, I find myself having the same dilemma. It's not just the use of the word 'home' and which place it designates now. I don't really have that problem with my friends anymore. The word 'home' doesn't really even exist in French. There's 'house', which is 'maison', and 'apartment' and all the other words to describe a building which can be a home, but when it comes to describing the concept of a place of settlement, they flounder. You have to say, 'chez (person's name)', like 'chez Caelli' or 'chez toi' (your house). You can't say 'I'm going home', it has to be 'I'm going chez moi', literally, 'to my home'. So there's the linguistic influence for the day.
No, what I'm talking about is where the concept of home is for me. What home really means, as a place, and exactly where I mean when I say it. You see, I love Australia with all my heart, I think it's the greatest place on earth bar none, and yet I believe that I will never live there again. I hope, really, that this is true. Australia can't offer me the job and the lifestyle that I want and need and believe I was born to (multilingual cycling journalists are a little lost in English-speaking AFL-centric Victoria). But when someone assumes that I'm French, or English, I'm quick to correct them, or tell them that their guess of my nationality is wrong. I'm proud to assert that I come from Australia, proud to wear our flag and mingle with other ex-pats and teach others our national songs about suicidal thieves. Australia is my birthplace that will forever hold my heart, and I proclaim with Dorothea Mackellar that it's the wide brown land for me, but can I really sing with Peter Allen that I still call Australia home? I'm not sure. My nationality and heritage is Australian, absolutely, and I won't let anyone tell me otherwise, but I don't think that Australia counts as my 'home' anymore (unless I get send back to Monash for another semester and find myself living Down Under again). Though in a slip of the tongue I sometimes talk about 'back home', I don't really think of Australia in that way anymore.
I've written before about how much I detest Paris, of how I hate living in cities and how of all cities Paris is not my favourite in any way whatsoever. Yet according to the English definition of 'home', it includes in part your current place of residence. Mine is Paris. Yet there's another element to home that includes an emotional attachment, that mental acceptance of a place as being where you're tied to. That I don't really have. Yet sometimes, when I go travelling and I'm on a train returning to Paris, alone, weary and ready to settle, I find myself glad to get back to Paris, glad to be going...and there I stop myself, for I can't think that. I can't think of Paris as 'home'. I don't want to be attached to that place. But I remember when I came back from Germany, having spent a lot on the next ticket out of there because nothing had really gone right since leaving Luxembourg, how I felt the most incredible sense of relief as we pulled into Gare de l'Est in Paris and I hopped on the metro home. Oops. You see? I was relieved to get back to Paris, to familiarity and also to a little apartment decorated in a million postcards and cycling press passes where three needy cacti and a plush turtle were waiting for me. The place I'd made my own - home. Can my apartment be home even if Paris is not?
But I had another, stranger feeling the other day, on a train going through Brittany somewhere on my latest excursion. Even though I recoil at any possibility of bonding with Paris, of desiring to call it home for any other reason than being my place of residence, and forming any other attachment than the little piece of Serenity that I call my apartment, as the train whizzed through green woods and fields and I watched curled up on the seat with a book in my hand, I felt some sort of connection with this place. France is not a place I want to have a connection with. Australia yes, of course, Girona in Spain, or Luxembourg, these are places I want to live, places with which I want to foster a spiritual connection that manifested itself from the first moment, these are places with which I would be proud to share an official link of residency, citizenship or simply love. I would love to say that I am Luxembourger, or that I am Catalan, to develop such a relationship with the place that I'm proud to wear its label. France was never one of these.
But over time I think I've become French. Not Parisian. I will never identify as Parisian. But French, just a person who is part of the country that is France. I didn't want this. But I find that despite my aversion to my specific place of residence, there is a link there. I feel a concern for this place, a connection, a...care. Maybe France is home now. I hope not. I prefer to think of Europe as 'home', until I can find that elusive place which I know is out there and will sing to my soul with all the joy of a lark who is learning to pray and which my soul will recognise as long-lost kindred to whom it has finally come home. There will be that deeper, meaningful, spiritual connection as well as the sense of comfort, security, familiarity, love, and the necessary residency which combine to create my idea of home.
But maybe there can be more than one type of 'home' for me, in the same way that I had 'home in Melbourne' and 'home in the country'. When I lived in Australia I called my Melbourne house 'home' and my Creswick house 'my parents' place'. Even then it hurt, since I knew in my heart of hearts that my country house was my home and my city house was just an impersonal place to live while I had to be in the city. But since I spent more time in the city, calling it 'home' was less confusing for my friends, and anyway I felt kind of cool talking about 'my parents' place' all the time like I was an independent young adult, instead of just a kid boasting of 'my house'.
My point is, maybe I can have different kinds of 'homes' around the world too - but with different names, of course. Australia can be 'Core of my heart, my country!' and for now France will be 'home'. Maybe one day a small town in Spain or Italy will be the one on which I happily bestow my beloved nomen of 'home' with all the love one has for a soulmate, while the 'Australia' of which I teach my elderly Spanish neighbours will be as a best friend or sister, and France will be the old friend with whom you have romantic tension, knowing that it will never be anything more and savouring it as it is. Different kinds of love for different kinds of home. Maybe this will finally allow me to untangle the confusing mess of loyalties I've developed in my continuing quest to find the place where I truly belong. Future me can bask in the warmth that is knowing where one's love and one's true place in the universe are. But in the meantime, I have a question:
Where is home?
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