THE MEANING OF HOME

A STORY ABOUT A GIRL WHO'S ALWAYS ON THE GO

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It’s been quiet over here lately.

It took me some time to sit down and write again, because a lot of what was going on in my head didn’t feel like something I wanted to confront, let alone write down.

And honestly, I didn’t even know where to start.

I could write about many things, though. It’s not as if nothing worth writing about has happened. And surely, I will find the time and courage to write about Seoul, about Fashion Week, about all the feelings during my time in Bali. About how this girl just always seems to be on the go.

Or simply about how far away I was from a home.

And now, at 7am on a Thursday morning, back in my old apartment, I know what I want to write about.

Up until now, I hadn’t realized how impactful this very specific feeling of coming home has been throughout my life.

I could start by telling you there was nothing better than coming home as a kid after a big holiday in the Balkans with my family. We usually arrived back home on a Saturday, which meant that my sister and I had the whole Sunday to play and do nothing but play in our pyjamas.

It’s one of the strongest and earliest feelings of home, and of coming home, that I can think of.

I could also tell you about the strong feeling of coming home to your favorite person, your boyfriend of four years, after spending three months apart because of an exhausting work project. Working 15 hours a day on set in a foreign country, living in a basement room so humid that even the gum wrapper (and the bubble gum intself) on your nightstand would go soft.

Since then, I’ve advised everyone to live at least two months under circumstances far below their usual standards, just to know how to appreciate being home again.

And lastly, I could tell you about the strong feeling of coming home to a place you built.

An apartment that screams your name. Scents that you recognize the moment you step through the door. And if you’re very lucky, being greeted by a tiny, fluffy companion who has missed you just as much as you have missed them.

So what should I tell you?

I lost all of these feelings of coming home.

Lately, the feeling of coming home meant anxiety, panic and disgust. I couldn’t imagine myself in my old apartment. Too much had happened. The place I had built for myself and for Maui, whom I miss every day, was not the same anymore.

It was the first place I had ever defined as “my home”. And now I couldn’t even imagine spending one night there alone.

I never felt like I had found MY home before.

And even the one here in Cologne made me question things sometimes.

I searched for my home everywhere.

Maybe Munich could be my home.

Maybe Paris could be my home.

Maybe Barcelona could be my home.

Maybe I should move to the end of the world and find my home there.

So home, I thought, was defined by a place. Obviously.

Thankfully, and unfortunately, I’m a very reflective person. So, of course, I started to understand quite early on

that I would be searching for home forever if I didn’t find home within myself.

So home, I thought, was defined by me. Obviously.

Yesterday, I experienced one more definition of home, that I didn’t expect to find.

After three weeks of traveling and three months of not being home, I came back to the city where I built my last home.

The feeling had already started to reveal itself during a conversation I had with a stranger I met at the airport. We ended up going in the same direction by train, since he was moving to Aachen (mind you, he is moving there from India).

He asked me if I was looking forward to coming home.

How do you react when you know that whatever you would honestly say right now would make you fall into tears within seconds?

He was so kind and calm. He told me that things would eventually fall into place.

Because the people I loved here, were home too, he said.

It got me then and there. I kept thinking about his words.

When I arrived in Cologne, one of my best friends, Jana, was waiting for me. I saw her on the other side of the street, carrying a cake and a cup of coffee. Because in Russia, you bake for your loved ones when they return home, I learned.

Falling into her arms after weeks of finding ways to make this homecoming less painful felt like medicine.

In my apartment, back home, everything was the same and nothing was the same.

It was empty. My little baby who used to be there so happily wasn’t there anymore.

What I didn’t know until then was that my girls, Jana and Klara, had met up not just to clean my apartment, but to decorate it and make it feel like home.

There were flowers delicately placed around the apartment, snacks, a pretty book on grief and my clothes beautifully hung in my closet.

There was Maui.

Pictures of him, framed and placed next to his urn.

I saw my best friends everywhere I looked, since they were the ones who had set up the little details.

I cried. I cried a lot.

And Jana was there to hold me. I couldn’t express otherwise how touched I was.

They turned the thing I was most afraid of - coming home - into something I didn’t expect to find.

They made me feel held.

They made me feel less alone.

And with that, they made coming home less scary.

Reflecting on my earlier definitions of home, I never realized what I was actually coming home to.

It was never the place.

It was always the ones I loved and lived with.

How come I never saw that so clearly?

And maybe that’s what makes it so challenging as a single person to find home.

You have to find yourself first in order to know what you’re coming home to.

But if you’re very lucky and you have people around you who love you, they will make it easier for you to see.

They will find ways, unspoken ways, to make you see the person you are, and that you carry home wherever you go.

I still think that home should be a place you can call yours.

And coming home to a place that you shared with a loved one won’t feel the same after they’re gone. Because of what you felt there with them.

There’s still no ending to this story.

I cannot tell you if coming home here will continue to feel uncomfortable, or if I will find ways to make it easier.

I‘m conviced that home is ultimately something I have to build within myself. And I know now that being deeply loved gives me the security from which I can do that.

It gives me the freedom to leave, explore, be alone, become whoever I am, and still know that there is someone, more than just someone, to return to.

And Maui, I choose to believe, I carry you wherever I go.

And if what all these beautiful people and the cat I love have in common is me -

well, how hard can it be, then, to find home within myself? ❤️