Seeking one's identity astride another piece of the world may seem counterintuitive, but I'm not the first to do it. When I first moved to Denmark and felt especially foreign, I would remind myself that my family, at least part of it, comes from this part of the world. I would rush to tell new friends and acquaintances, Danes mostly, that I have Swedish heritage. That we grew up celebrating Santa Lucia, my mum lighting candles and braiding bread coloured pale yellow with saffron. Thinking, (hoping) that this would buy me entrance into the secret club. It didn't.
My ancestors knew that there was something better in the (to them) unexplored wilds of the Americas than what kept them in Sweden. They didn't have so much of a choice as an ultimatum. But, I did. I chose to pack all of my worldly possessions into a borrowed blue suitcase. Still unclaimed and lying under my bed, by the way. A reverse migration of sorts undertaken in the deepest months of winter and leading to a new life. Sometimes I wonder if they would be happy that I came back.
I remind myself that despite being out of reach of all that I knew, I still exist. Deep connections and memories like threads keep me rooted, hold me safe. Threads that are soft like homespun wool, fragile until you try to break them. As I fumble my way through a new language, letting my tongue feel new words as they exit my mouth, tasting like possibility but also like failure. Occasionally, I still wake from dreams grasping at a feeling that fades as I rub the sleep from my eyes. Searching for something that used to be commonplace and now feels exotic.
Unlike other terminal illnesses, homesickness is not something that consumes your life all at once, angrily gobbling up pieces of you until nothing remains. Rather, it is something flighty that makes its arrival known in bouts and spells: A longing for a once perfunctory road trip undertaken each summer, the tiger-balm-smell of my mother and the soft hands of my sibling. Baking hot summer heat endured solely for the promise of cool reprieve in a lake my grandparents have spent their lives swimming in. A yearly pilgrimage, a birthright put on hold. Shatteringly cold glacial meltwater, an ingredient that I didn’t know my body needed. Something cloudy now clear to me: Velvet river water and negative temperatures lie in wait deep in my stomach emerging in kicks and flutters. I am so far away.
And then, gone as quick as it came. Leaving in the subtle punctuation mark of an exhale. But it will return. It always does. I saw a therapist once, an expat like me but from Spain, who assured me that the feeling would fade after a while. And for friends of mine, it has.
The pandemic has intensified the feeling of living in a world 2.0, where my old life feels like an abandoned Earth, one that was left not out of the necessity, but instead a desire to grow and stretch myself. It's been over a year since I've seen my family. Since I've gotten to hug my mum. Laugh with my sibling in real-time. Eat oysters with my dad and drink too much wine. And it's wearing on me, literally. Because I wear it, this sadness. Heavy and overwhelming some days and tiny and unassuming others. Sometimes, I can't breathe. Early on in the lockdown, I woke up from a dream where I was deep underwater in a tunnel of light, swimming upwards, fighting to reach air and sustenance and life, but I could never reach the surface. I think of that dream a lot.
The moon offers a piece of consolation, soft and glowing, it reassures me to know that 9 hours after I step out into a night glowy with promise, my mum can do the same.
I grab onto these small luminous threads of hope, and I think as we weather these coming months, this is something we all need to do, collecting them until we have enough to make something useful.
