Packing for a trip home involves more than clothes. There are gifts to choose, expectations to manage, and a quiet question about which version of yourself will step off the plane.
On arrival, everything is both familiar and slightly off. The streets are shorter or longer than remembered. The language comes back, with new gaps. Relatives notice changes you cannot see.
Then comes the return journey, which is its own small grief: the sense of leaving a place that is no longer entirely yours, for another that is not yet entirely home.
Holding both
Many people eventually stop trying to resolve it. Home becomes plural: a set of places and people, each holding a piece of who you are.
Home is a place you can be visited by and visit at the same time.
Elikia Editorial
That can be a loss, but it can also be a kind of richness, as long as you allow yourself to feel both.
