Home is Where the Bags Are

Why is it, I have often wondered, that the questions of being a young 20-something begin their nagging in the early hours of the morning? Somewhere around 1 or 2 AM, when I'm otherwise on track to go to sleep, every pondering I might have creeps into conscious one after another until a ball of anxiety comes, only to dissipate into not enough sleep.

When we are in transit, for however long, what had once appeared routine and stable vanishes. Where we are, what we do in that place, and the people we come to know in that place all have a way of making themselves feel comfortable. They define us for what they are. We take them for granted because it's always been that way, or in the case of moving somewhere new, because that's what we came to do there, intentionally or not. We are the sum of our surrounding parts, validated by our participation in them. Yet when we move, that changes, and we have to start over and reconstruct the routines, the contacts, the comfort of familiarity. We become undefined in the new place simply by virtue of having no parts with which to form a sum, because those parts were left behind in memories somewhere else.

In the process of moving my things, first from the apartment I was living in, now from the friend's house I'm staying at, and amid all of the uncertainties of moving, the same questions of purpose and good faith in my own decision-making have come up. I have vacillated between being absolutely sure of my path, questioning it to the point of worry whether it was a good decision in the first place, and being ambivalent to everything about the move. For as much as I accept each move and each change as a part of life, a process that I have actively and willingly participated in, and one that I have mostly determined for myself, the sensation of letting life flow and not being in control of the outcome also pops up. I don't have any certainty about where the course of my actions will take me, but when I look back on the most momentous of the decisions I've taken—including, let's not forget, coming to Portugal in the first place—I never had that comfort. Comfortable decision-making is another way of lying to yourself that you know everything. If the decision is too exciting or too comfortable, it is an unfinished affair.

So I have come to the conclusion, after making myself at home in several apartment in Lisbon, with short periods of staying at this friend's house interspersed in between, that home is not a permanent anchor that will immediately provide us with a cocoon to retreat into from our real world selves. The highs and lows that we experience happen at home just as much as they happen outside of it. We can put as many posters on the wall, rearrange the furniture so many times, deep-clean the rooms, and spritz the air, but each place that we make home is a passing phenomenon. People come and go and their importance in life changes; some who may seem close often prove not to be and others who seem distant can come to be like family. Home is where the bags are and where our most important possessions reside, for however long, in whatever capacity.

Home doesn't have to be one house or one apartment or one building in which you spend years of your life nesting, attempting to create a domestic utopia. Home can be a dramatic sublet, a creaky old room on a high floor, a mattress on the floor in company that you enjoy. Home can be anywhere, so long as you take it there with you, because home is where you feel that you are realizing those things that make up who you are.