The Migratory Bird Comes Home

If our journey away from home is marked with a bright migratory red line on the globe, I’d like to think, that come December, the line retraces its steps.

We associate coming home more so with the short-bursts of travel, or if we’re lucky, a year long trip on the other side of the world. But coming home is more than just the destination we add in the “Return” text box when booking a flight.

Most of us have lived or are currently living in a city, a country, a continent far from home (with “far” being more of a feeling rather than an exact metered distance). We bask in our independence, hustle at school or work, and build our own little nests. Sometimes that also means remembering to do our laundry, or realize that warm meals don’t magically prepare themselves. Some days we miss the neighborhood street food, and some days we miss the most random processed snack that we didn’t know we’d miss - and then insist on having them shipped from home.

When December rolls around, we let out an exhale. It means coming home to the same street with signs you could read. It means replaying the same pleasantries to your retired neighbour before politely refusing his offer for tea. It means going to the same old places with the people who knew you the longest. It’s comfort and familiarity hugs you like a warm, cozy blanket.

Yet December makes me feel uneasy. When I come back to the room I grew up in, I feel a little bit out of place. The bed too small, the massive collection of books or the clothes in my closet bewilder me, making me question why I ever thought I had taste at the tender age of fourteen.

In the passenger seat, I drive through the same streets I’ve seen through the same window, and yet somehow I don’t remember the way. Do I turn before or after the old supermarket with the rusty sign? Does this turn lead to a beloved childhood friend or the neighborhood boy I had a crush on? And slowly I start to question the ease that should come with familiarity. Slurping the noodles I couldn’t stop dreaming of when I first moved away, somehow they don’t taste exactly as I remembered. Parents are eager to fulfill the annual Welcome Home List packed with activities and food I’ve missed, and so all I could say is how much I’ve missed this warm bowlful of noodles, hiding my slight disappointment. Somehow it slipped my mind that my parents would age. Somehow I thought being away would also mean a convenient pause button, so that when I return they would stay the same, but compelling evidence tells me otherwise: strands of grey hair in the shower drain, half opened blister packs of medication, a different, perhaps outdated perspective…

It takes me a while to readjust. Coming home should mean returning to my skin, being my most comfortable self. Yet I find myself feeling like an outsider, a fraud, a fish-out-of-water.

I feel, without a better way to say it, homeless.

I guess I could say I’m part of Generation Boundless: we no longer associate our birth countries as home, nor are we tied to a particular place to feel at home. Calling ourselves “Global Citizens” leaves a bad taste in our mouths, as if we were a pamphlet-perfect version of a generation.

I feel guilty for my discomfort because I’m lucky enough to be able to have a place to kind of call “home”, to come home to.

I think of first-generation immigrants making a long journey, leaving all that is familiar, all that is considered “home” to pursue a better life. They would work tirelessly and spend their day-to-day not understanding the language of the land. Ticking the “Minority” or “Other” box for the first time in their lives. I guess all they could have ever wanted was to visit home, to be able to celebrate the comfortable, the familiar.

Eating noodles with my family, I’d tell them stories of my life away from home. I’d talk about my new friends, all the new challenges, and the local habits that I found strange. My parents are wide-eyed, and at times more like their eyes are welling up, excited and proud to hear the experiences that I am lucky to have. And I think of these immigrant families that could not go home, yet are gathered in some friend’s small house in a cold December night, full of music, laughter, and feeling the most at home as they could ever be.

So I’ve come to terms with that: I would never associate a place as my home. But in these small moments, in the warm embrace of what is slightly familiar and the people I could be unabashedly myself around, I’m happy that I’ve made the journey home. I’m happy to have gone back and repainted my red line across the globe, making sure the line is bolder and the bond is stronger, when I return to where I am, eleven months of the year.

Words by Nadia Pritta Wibisono