Not home-sick

I've been in Berlin for - I don't know actually, less than a year, more than six months - now. People sometimes ask me when I'll be coming home. And I really don't know what they mean. I live here now, in this flat, in this city. Surely this is home? But then again, when travel to Lund, I say that I'm going home. And the same is true for Gothenburg.

I'm not home-sick, I'm home-confused.

When there's a post announced abroad that looks half decent, people ask me if I'm going to apply, as if it's clear that I will do just that. Apparently I've become the kind of person who at least some don't expect to really settle down in one specific place. I'm not really sure how that happened. I used to be the girl who played it safe, the girl who was going to marry a safe and secure unadventurous guy, have 2,5 or whatever children, and not really make much of a fuss. That didn't happen. I have no idea what happened, really. I guess I'll have to paraphrase a friend who said: "I just can't go on living like that. I want to laugh. I want to have fun!". I'm having fun now. I'm playing a whole other game, but , boy, am I having fun!

And that all happened at the same that that my feelings of home started to become weird.

For a long time, I pined for Australia. I still do in a way. There's a small emptiness in my chest, which can only be filled by the thought of warm air and gum-trees. But at the same time, there's another emptiness in there, one which can only be filled by Swedish west coast granite cliffs, salt water and midnight skinny-dipping. I also have a small emptiness that longs for narrow stone alleys that smell of roses in a small old university town in southern Sweden. And I'm sure that, eventually, there will be an emptiness there for flowering chestnuts in a large metropolis.

Maybe some day I will even feel an emptiness for this rootlessness.