A friend of mine wrote something beautiful recently, an article moving through the places she’s lived and the memories tied to each one. She’s in the UK now, and she menioned how homesick she intermittenly is. This, in turn, got me thinking: what do we actually call home?
Different people define it differently. Most often it’s used as a geographical expression. But like the wandering fluffy white seeds that float by, the ones Nigerians wrongly blame for “Apollo,” I have no physical home. I instead think of home in layers, in decreasing order of what matters.
- First: Home is your people. As you grow older, these people come in different shapes. There’s the obvious one: family, parents, siblings, the people you have your earliest common memories with. But if you’ve studied something like medicine, with all its extended years (I was in ‘school’ from 2014 to 2022), you realize home also becomes the people you share that journey with. They’re there with you through the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows.
- Second: shared experience. This is tied to the people, but it’s its own thing. When we were supposed to start our final exams in June 2022, an ASUU strike hit right in the middle of it. Resilient, resourceful students that we were, we lobbied all the way up to the vice chancellor to make a case for us, as we were already two years behind the colleagues who’d graduated in 2020. Painfully, we were rebuffed. It was a solemn walk back to the University College Hospital, where our accommodation was, from the main campus.
On getting back and sitting around the table, trying to order food from the Hall Cafeteria, one of the attendants didn’t respond to us promptly. This in turn led to a statement from one of us (and I paraphrase): “If this ASUU strike wasn’t happening, would we be in a situation right now where you’re snubbing us instead of us being doctors already?” Several of us just burst into tears. Later that night, at one of our melancholy get-togethers in someone’s room, we listened to “Don’t Let Me Go” by Cigarettes After Sex, passed the bottle around, and mourned the whole situation together.
Third, because all of this happens within a geographical setting: place. That’s the third element of what home is.
And then I ask myself: if I had all my people and the same experiences, but not in Nigeria, would I still call it home? Right now I’m in Nigeria, the place people abroad call home and are homesick for, and I still feel that same ache, that same feeling of being alone. Maybe not as bad as theirs, since they’re somewhere new and somewhere cold. But it’s there.
So what do we call home? Is it a place? Is it the experience? Is it people? Because if it takes all three together, one thing follows: We’ll never fully be at peace. We will never be whole. And we will never fully be at home again. One piece will always be missing.
Unless that’s not a flaw unique to my situation. It’s what home has always cost everyone. The people from UCH are scattered now, in different specialties and different cities. Even if we’d all stayed in Nigeria, we wouldn’t still be a group of students sharing food after a defeat, crying to that song in that room. That configuration was already unrepeatable the moment it ended. Home in its fullest sense isn’t a place I failed to hold onto. It’s something that gets built and then necessarily closes, and I carry it rather than live inside it. My friend in the UK is homesick for a version of home a plane ticket won’t return her to, because the Nigeria she’d fly back to isn’t the Nigeria she left. The people there have moved too.
So maybe home is a mental model: a feeling of comfort we run to whenever we’re encountering something new and uncomfortable. Not a place we return to, but a state we reach for. And if we accept that we’ll never put that exact configuration of people, moments, and place back together, then maybe the only honest response is this: whatever form home comes in now, take what you can get of it, and enjoy it as much as you can.
In the meantime, I try to fill the loneliness of the present with whatever forms of home I can gather. I have group chats with some of my friends across three different social media platforms. I keep streaks going with some of them. I loop them in on the most useless inanities of my day. Instead of walking down the block to a friend’s room, I text him and tell him to call me when he can. I fill the days with work and the weekends with sleep, TikTok, memes and outings.
I am not sure I will ever be home, but then again, I am not sure I ever was.
Originally published on Medium ↗