Maybe it’s just “Trying to Fit In at Twenty-Two”

Or is it 

Trying to “Find Home at Twenty-Two”?

Create home?

Become home?

When I first moved to Auckland, it was midwinter. At least I was hoping it was midwinter and not the beginning of winter because it was so damn cold;  I couldn’t tell you how cold because I’m still getting used to this whole Celsius thing. And by “getting used to,” I mean I’m just not checking the temperature because I cannot be bothered to multiply by two and add thirty-two and that’s basically, almost accurate and close enough…

I travelled here with a poorly-packed duffel, and one poorly-chosen jacket. Thank Goodness the matriarch of this house lent me more than just a room; I accidentally exhaled with desperate relief as she offered me her black Kathmandu jacket — one that wouldn’t do her much good on her European holiday, the same model I contemplated purchasing just the day before, one that (if you know how much those things cost, you know) I was much happier to borrow for a short while, as long as it was midwinter and I would soon see Spring and shed my many layers of sweaters and scarves and coats.

This jacket was a proper jacket; nothing like I had ever owned before. Outside, I was actually warm and it occurred to me that the cold is not so bad if you don’t actually have to feel it. 

What hilarious creatures we are.

Walking across the street always makes me feel quite huge. I become massively aware of how I walk and I fool myself into thinking that the drivers in their cars are terribly concerned with how I walk, among other things about me. As I braved foreign suburban streets enveloped in someone else’s Kathmandu jacket, I wondered if people could tell that I was new to town. I wondered, mostly, if people could tell that I was from America. 

Some people who definitely know I’m not from here:

The Canadian server at the brewery who had to tell me that, here, you settle the bill up at the counter, after she watched me sit in front of my empty plate for almost 30 minutes — not that I had anywhere to go. 

The cashier at the neighborhood market who watched patiently alongside those in line behind me as I dug into my jeans, pulled out a coin, performatively inspected it, and said, “that’s a dollar, right?”

The young man who picked me up at 8:38 on a Sunday night, “to take me for a drink,” and spilled his “buge” on the way over. What the fuck is a buge? you ask! — it’s a bong!

Anyone who has seen me trying to navigate the metro over the past week, terrified-shitless to press the big red button that yells “STOP” in the most menacing way. (I’ve been walking a lot.) 

Anyone who has heard me pronounce “BNZ” as “BEE ENN ZEE” (not to worry, I’ve since made the adjustment)

After traveling as much as I did as a youthful little cub, a hitchhiker on the backs of my two parents, I have come to desire more than mere visitor status in my sub-adulthood. I have come to crave the feeling of home — not of four walls but of the comfort that comes with settling into a new place, having plants to water and rent to pay and a yoga studio to walk to in the mornings and a coffee spot to head to afterwards and knowing the best place in town for Indian food and also cheap tap beer.

My best friend Cocou is a clumsy Afro-German who is afraid of oil in soup. She feels things deeply and her brain pathways are full of traffic jams. She comes from a place very different from the one in which she currently resides. When the man asks her,

“Where are you from?”

she looks at me and exhales an easy, light laugh. He looks confused. He thinks that maybe she finds the question confusing but really, she knows the question is unimportant. Especially when its asker wants one, easy answer; perhaps has only one, easy answer he, more than anything, wishes to share. 

Born in Togo, under a name I do not know, to caretakers I have never met, Cocou moved to France when she was young, and now studies in Germany, but has found and left pieces of herself on her travels, scattered around this broken world. 

You’re welcome, world.

A Black woman in a white world, why would she want to claim a place that refuses to claim her?

Since meeting Cocou, I have thought about what might actually define home to me. 

Looking however I look apparently invites people to ask me about my ethnicity and talking however I talk evidently invites people to ask me about my nationality and because I keep going places where these are interesting invitations, perhaps I crave it — the standing out. I don’t actually know.

I am of many different places, as I have detailed here before and won’t do again. The core of me is a lovely, mixed-up, seedy loaf of bread; it feels to me as if the whole world is held together just inside my ribcage, as long as my ancestors’ journeys are mine. And I believe they are. Everywhere they have touched has touched me. That feels good to me. 

“Where are you from?”

What a silly little question!

I have, for the time being, come to land on the idea that I am the home I crave. I can keep everything that I am within the boundaries of my Self, my Self can be my home, wherever I am. There is infinite power in creating my own narrative, in new places, where no one knows who I am or the stories that make me or the loves that have shaped me; there is also infinite comfort in a familiar, strong community. At twenty-two and newly on my own, I am balancing the new and the old. I am calling my loved ones and talking to strangers. I am cooking at home and trying takoyaki from the food truck on the corner.  

That was a dirty lie; I haven’t tried it yet.

I am both homesick and escaping home. I am both scared and excited. I am embracing the both/and of my new and ordinary life; I think this may be the most important part of crossing the street in someone else’s jacket. 

xx

Until You Know Better

Ask instead: “What does home feel like?” Or maybe: “Is there one place that feels like home to you?” — even if you just ask yourself

Water your plants from the same bottle you drink from in the morning — it just feels fun to drink the same water as your green friends

Schedule a Dream Day; let yourself get way up into the purple hues of crown-chakra-land and map out some possibilities for your next few days/weeks/months/years

Great Artists Steal

Read “A Letter to the Wanderer,” a poem by Morgan Harper Nichols — it’s everything I feel about home, just far more succinctly than what I just wrote.