Where is Home? - the Expat Lament

I'm packing now and sad to be doing so.  Glad I will see my husband and friends in my adopted city soon but sad to be leaving the one place that feels like home...actually, there are two places now, but this is one of them.  Another is an obscure little island in Scotland.

The reading went well and I wish I could work that momentum, stay here and see the project forward but instead must do the wrenching leaving thing again...and back to what resembles something like real life after a long flight.  To a place that because of my accent will probably never feel like home, even if there are people there who are very, very dear to me and I know if I left that city, I would miss it too.  This is what happens.  Seven years in another country and you can't shake that place either.  I think if I moved back here, where for seven years every time I've visited I've been on holiday, I would miss the other place and vice-versa.  There is no re-do or undoing of experience.  It's so strange that way.

I cried last night because of the stress now over of the reading, because I felt lonely afterwards without having my husband around to celebrate or just to play backgammon with and chill out or talk about what happened and all that.  So I am a person torn by many competing demands and ideas and goals and desires.  Or I could say it this way: I have a full life that spans continents and I am lucky for that.  And both are true.

I should finish packing now, typing this is a way to delay that last step and go back to where I am a 'permanent resident.'  but is it home?  Especially if the refrigerator isn't working?

We'll see...maybe the refrigerator will be working and maybe I'll feel like I'm home.  Life continues to surprise me.  What will be unique is that my husband will be there when I get home and that hasn't happened in a long time since we both travel so much, he more than me.  A home-coming therefore will happen, and for this I am grateful...

But still I feel sad...comings and goings for someone who was forced to move so many times when I was young and usually each move was to someplace worse...well, it's hard.  So probably packing and a nap will be a good thing.

Next blog will happen where I live and not in transit most likely.  Hmmmmm.