home? I am. I am. I am.

My dear S.,

sorry for not answering in a while.. I am now in Austria. And, as always, I had a lot of stress around going there. Sigh. I just hate leaving places and people and kitties and stuff. Even though I know it is only for a few weeks and that I can relax where I'm going to. You might think I got better at it after 4 (!) years of travelling back and forth, but no, I didn't. After a twelve-hours trainride I arrived, and brought with me a big thunderstorm, which accompanied me for at least five hours of the ride. (The most exiting things on the ride: a guy who asked me for a nailclipper because his toenails were so lang that they started bleading- yuk!, but my helpers-syndrome still made me borrow him mine (I already cleaned it); a policewoman stopping me at Munich and asking whether I had cigarettes and what I was doing traveling about Europe.)

And then there is arriving of course. Coming back home, to this old place of growing up. I remember, that always when I was a child and we went on a holiday abroad for two weeks, everything in my hometown seemed to have changed in that short time, everything felt so new when we came back. Now I usually spend three or so months away from home, and nothing ever changes. Only my brother, who's getting more and more grown-up every single time. He is such a cool guy, I really miss having him around.

SO, in your last post you asked me a really difficult question about "home". This is of course a topic that keeps me busy a lot of times. Until I was 18, there was only one home for me, in my small mountain town in Austria. Now I guess I'd say that Antwerp feels more home to me. There I can really be myself and go further in my life. Coming back here feels very much like going into a golden cage... (I feel very sorry for saying that somehow-- but this is just what it feels like at the moment.)

My past here, and what I used to be and do here seem so incredibly far away right now. I feel so estranged from my former self sometimes.. This proces is rather painful sometimes.

Hm. At this very moment I would say, that home is, where I am not obliged to hide any part whatsoever of myself. Where my love is, where my heart is, where my thoughts are able to circulate.

If you'd asked me this same question two years ago, my answer would have been a rather different one: for Antwerp I used the expression "zu Hause", meaning something like "living at" for me; Austria-home I would call "daheim" - "at home", where my heart lives.

So there definitively has been a change, a change of perspective. I am still trying to work out a durable solution though.

I think, that for us, who left their country for studying abroad and building up a whole new life there, "home" is exceedingly dificult to find and define.
You said, "home is where I am". This is a goal, a big goal I am aiming to achieve. I want to feel so good with/in/about myself that I can call myself my own home.



This thought is one I can connect to the last book I read, "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath.
It is an extremely intense book about the breakdown of a young girl. Sylvia Plath lets her protagonist Esther describe her feelings so beautifully, with the metaphor of a bell jar, which in German you would call a Glashaube/Glasglocke.
I'll try to find that one passage online, since I left the book in Antwerp...
found. Digital age and all that.



"Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. [...]To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."



So, I guess this is really so true. Home is only wherever you are ok with yourself. If you are not in one particular place, then it is unlikely that you will be in any other. This sounds a little dramatic and overgeneralising- but this is my experience at the moment.
(Plath compares feeling depressed to being locked up in a bell jar, you can see everything outside and are there, in the middle of it, yet you can only breath in your own sour air and think your own sour thoughts. Sylvia Plath was a very wise woman.)

It was so intense to read this book, at times I thought that I couldn't handle any more. Yet I couldn't put it away, it is so good.

The other main thought of the book, also related to the home-and-self- question:



"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am. I am. I am."

This is the life-saving thought. For all.
--
Some time ago you drew a plus- sign on one of your pulses. I wanted to have one too, and a minus on the other side. And now I want them always to be there, as a sort of reminder of how things go naturally. And then "I am. I am. I am" would fit so perfectly with it. of course other people had that thought already, look:

And there are plenty more to find on the interwebs. I prefer the plain six words though. And, yes, also still fitting to the topic (and with credits to N.), this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we_czU9sJ3g

Please do listen to it. It's Metric with "Help I'm Alive" and a heart-pounding film.

My dear S., this was a whole lot of emotional and semi-philosophical shit. My next post will be about crafty things, I guess. I wanted to add them here, but this as enough material for one read. Now I will enjoy listening to the heavy wind outside, lie in my own bed (the one of my two own beds that I had first- that is) and think about that I am and my heart is beating like a hammer

loads of love,

m