A Home at The End of The World

(Partly as a response on Heikki's comment on my previous post since I was about to write about this at any rate): It's not just loving and longing for stuff back home. There's more in the emotional basket than the varying degree to that. It's also about not having them here, having lost them. They're replaced – or not exactly replaced as much as substituted – by something unfamiliar, something that unmistakeably is a home, but whose I can't tell; by people that are undoubtedly friendly but with a friendliness that stubbornly fails to drop my force field of uneasiness. Be it temporary, it still feels like dying.

In the basket there's also feeling and not feeling as if you have no home. And there's feeling and not feeling you're surrounded by people you are afraid of like Virginia Woolf was afraid of her servants. I most long for not only my own home, but to have a home here at the end of the world, a home to miss when I do get back. As it stands, I feel like there won't be one for me here, despite all the effort.

So I have a boyfriend back home, always comforting and supporting; I have my mum; I have a couple of friends that actually do keep in touch; I give my most sincere thanks for all that. There's friendly people all around, and all day long, every day, I do what I love the most: create. Someone told me I shouldn't have anything to worry about. And I did try comparing my situation of anguish to that of Guantanamo prisioners or Palestinians and Lebanese that have lost their homes under the crushing foot of Israeli terror (yes, God bless those heavenly missiles, each & every single one of them). Needless to say, I'm totally out of scale. This, me coming here, it was my decision, my urgently resolute determination to leave everything; to start again, in a sense; then return, hopefully victorious, having conquered not only the world but myself. Being enough, then.

Being able to settle.

Yes, longing for things is what drives us on. At least I look forward to returning to a home that is more a home than when I left it. I shall settle to it. Settle to the arms that envelope me; the arms that I perhaps would have been unable to settle to before. Settle to my roots. Settle to my size, myself. Settle as I am trying to settle here, now.

How lucky I am to have even the smallest portion of my friends send me their regards that seem to miraculously reduce down these 17 000 kilometers, these 11 months.

"We want so much, don't we?"
"I suppose we do."
—Michael Cunningham: The Hours

Footnotes:

• Got me a bike. Pretty damn good one, too. Bikers go on the carway so I should probably learn me the road rules before a crazy Kiwi turns me into pulp (I already witnessed a car crash).
• Mom must have been right when she said you get used to everything since 'everything' seems to include left-hand traffic and wearing shoes indoors.
• What at first seemed to be a requirement of 45 hours of work a week turns out to be more of the 80h/week sort.
• I'm starting to get the hang of the "Eh?" Kiwis stick to the end of the sentences. It's somewhat the equivalent of "isn't it?".
• I fell in love with a greyhound named Turbo.