There is a very specific kind of heartbreak that comes from standing in your childhood kitchen and missing the grocery store near your apartment in another city. Not the people first. Not even the life. Not the grand things. Just the deeply ordinary specifics of it all.
The Żabka downstairs where you know exactly which aisle has the Greek yogurt. The tram announcements you once found impossible and now strangely comforting. The little walk back home where nobody knows you, yet the city somehow still expects you.
And then you come home. Home-home.
The place with your old curtains and old steel containers that have survived three generations and every single one of your mother’s mood swings. To ceiling fans that sound like childhood. To mangoes that taste so offensive in their perfection that Europe should frankly apologize. And for the first two days, you dissolve into it beautifully. You become twelve again. You eat without thinking. You don’t mentally rehearse pronunciations before ordering coffee. And you come to terms with the fact that nobody says your name like they’re solving a puzzle.
And then, usually while doing something completely unimportant, you miss the other life with such intensity that it feels almost disloyal. Which is insane because why is a human being emotionally attached to seasonal depression and 4 p.m. sunsets? But there you are, sitting inside the home you once desperately wanted to return to, quietly missing another one. And that’s when it hit me: Human beings never really have one home. We just keep collecting places where different versions of us learned how to survive. Maybe that is the strange thing about growing up. We don’t really replace one home with another. We keep adding them.
One place knows your childhood handwriting. Another knows the person you became when you had to figure things out on your own. One place knows you as somebody’s daughter. Another knows you as the person who learnt how to build a life from scratch, sometimes with very little more than a suitcase and unreasonable confidence.
And neither version is fake. And that is the strange part.
Maybe that is why airports feel so emotional. Everyone is carrying pieces of somewhere else. Someone has homemade pickle tucked between clothes. Someone is answering a work call in an accent acquired entirely through professional survival. Someone is going home. Someone is leaving it. Someone is doing both at the same time. We have become very good at belonging everywhere and feeling slightly misplaced everywhere too.
And when you live far enough away, you start finding strange little ways to keep one place with you while you are living in another. Sometimes it is food. Sometimes it is a song that suddenly makes an ordinary Tuesday feel like a festival back home. Sometimes it is calling your mother just to hear the background noise of the kitchen. Sometimes it is prayer.
Faith, especially, has a strange way of surviving migration. Not always as rules or rituals. Sometimes simply as instinct. People carry prayers into places where nobody knows their language, and sometimes walk into a temple, church or mosque, simply because being somewhere familiar feels like being held for a moment.
And perhaps, after a while, we start carrying home in more literal ways too.
I have always found it fascinating how much of a person can fit inside a handbag. Every woman I know can pack her life into one or two suitcases with terrifying efficiency. Not because she enjoys minimalism. Because somewhere, quietly, she learned early that permanence is fragile. But then again, not all women move through the world this way.
I know women, even within my own inner circle, who step out with just their phone in hand and absolute trust in the universe. No oversized tote bag carrying emergency ecosystems. No “just in case” inventory. No portable survival kit disguised as fashion. And every time I see that, it fascinates me. Because I genuinely cannot imagine leaving the house without carrying half my contingency plan with me.
Charger. Medicine. Cash. Tissues. Water. Safety pin. Something to eat. Something for a headache. Something for rain. Something for a situation that has not happened, probably will not happen, and yet I would like to be emotionally prepared for it anyway.
But I think the older I get, the more I understand that the bag was never really about the things inside it. But about a particular kind of independence that is not glamorous at all. Like carrying backup chargers. Memorizing routes. Stuffing more tissues in bags we swear are “not even that heavy.”
Maybe that is why some people move through life lighter than others. Not because they are careless. Not because they are less capable. Just because somewhere, perhaps unconsciously, they learned that someone or something will catch them if things go wrong.
And some of us learned the opposite.
Tiny acts of self-preservation repeated so many times that eventually they become your personality.
A friend once called it the safety net.
This little big privilege of moving through the world knowing there is softness waiting beneath your mistakes. That if something falls apart, someone will absorb part of the impact before it reaches you completely. I understand that now in a way I probably didn’t before.
And perhaps somewhere along the way, we stop noticing how much effort it takes to feel safe. Until we finally experience what it is like to put the damn bag down. Maybe that is why certain objects become so precious when we live away from home. The old wallet. The familiar scarf. The little pouch that has crossed borders and apartments and versions of us, which I would like to call the tiny witnesses to many lives lived.
And that is what adulthood has quietly been for me: learning how to build small pockets of home wherever I am, while carrying enough of myself to survive the places that don’t know me yet. Which brings me back to that long stay in India earlier this year. I had gone home for longer than usual, and somewhere between sleeping in my old room, eating food I didn’t have to plan, and hearing the familiar sounds of a house that knew me before I knew myself, I became aware of how different it feels to be looked after. There was something wonderfully disorienting about it. For a little while, I didn’t have to be the person who knew where everything was. And yet, somewhere in the middle of all that familiarity, I realised that eight years can do something irreversible.
They can make a foreign city part of your nervous system. Every year around this time, I look back at the girl who arrived in Warsaw eight years ago. I wonder what she thought she was doing. I remember the things she was afraid of, the things she was certain about, and the things she had absolutely no idea were coming.
I think about all the people who entered and left, all the versions of me that came and went, all the ordinary days that didn’t look important while I was living them. I think about all the completely unremarkable days, grocery runs, bad weather, tired evenings, ordinary conversations, waiting for trams, coming home: the kind of days you don’t photograph because you assume there will always be another one.
Which is probably why coming back from India felt so strange. I hadn’t left home to come back to home. I had simply left one home and returned to another. And maybe that is the strange privilege of having lived long enough in more than one place to belong: you become slightly inconvenient. You have multiple kitchens you can miss. Multiple streets that can make you nostalgic. Multiple versions of yourself waiting in different corners of the world, each convincing that this was the real you. Maybe all of them are right.
Eight years later, I think Warsaw has given me something I didn’t know I was coming here to learn. Not just how to live somewhere else. But how to become someone who can.
And perhaps that is why I think about the bag again.
For years, I thought carrying everything with me was simply how I moved through the world. But maybe the real thing I was learning to carry was myself, realising that the things I once thought were proof that I was alone were sometimes the very things teaching me that I wasn’t helpless. That the bag I kept overpacking, the routes I memorised, the tiny contingency plans I made for everything from rain to existential collapse were not just habits. They were evidence.
Evidence that, somewhere along the way, I had become someone I could rely on.
Eight years is a long time to live somewhere. Long enough for a place to stop being the backdrop to your life and become part of its grammar. Long enough for the foreignness to wear off at the edges. Long enough to miss it while sitting in the place you once called home. Maybe that is what this annual looking-back ritual has really been about all these years. Not counting time. Not measuring how much I have changed.
Just noticing, once a year, that the girl who arrived here is a little further away now, not because I abandoned her, but because I have carried her through eight years of becoming. And maybe that is why I can miss India while being here, and miss Warsaw while being there, without either feeling like a betrayal. Maybe having more than one home is simply the price of having more than one life within the same lifetime. You leave one place, and it stays inside you. You arrive somewhere else, and slowly, almost rudely, that place gets inside you too. Until one day you realise you are carrying both. And maybe, after eight years, that is the thing I am most grateful for: I didn’t have to choose which version of home was the real one.
I just had to become big enough to hold both.
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