Nella Aarne

I visited the UK for the first time since leaving in 2023. It had been too long. On the day of the outgoing flight, I woke up around 6am with an inexplicable pain in my leg and was convinced that I was having a thrombosis. I packed what felt like nearly everything I own and was convinced that I would die from a stroke during the flight. I didn’t. The pain in my leg disappeared as soon as we landed. At the baggage reclaim, I confronted the fact that, for the first time since the age of 19, I had arrived without any kind of home waiting for me there and with my entire life set up somewhere else. A few days later, I sat in the analyst’s consulting room – also for the first time in three years, trying to articulate this realisation – but it took minutes to utter the words, and my eyes were streaming with tears. “What did you expect to discover?” he asked me. “That I knew this already”, I said.

To my great relief, I discovered that I still had friends and acquaintances there. I met some of the closest ones, whom I had missed terribly, and was grateful for every second spent together and every word exchanged. Even the guy running the cross harbour service in Bristol asked what brings me back on his boat. He had no idea how loaded his question felt, but I managed to keep it simple and say that I was about to have lunch with my former colleagues. It felt like coming up for air, realising that others really had witnessed me occupying those spaces and that my presence in them had meant something, at least for some, at least for a while. I’ll never stay away for as long again.

I was asked whether it might be possible to think of home as something that can be in two places. No choice, I gather. Nearly 20 years later, I can only begin to fathom the cost of the decision I made in my late teens: I will always have to live between two places, both equally formative and important but in different ways. How reductive of me to think that I could just “return home”, almost as if pretending that a huge chunk of my life never happened. Not that I ever wanted to, it just felt easier than facing the heartache of leaving. But the work of mourning must be done.