Growing Between Homes

I never imagined that at 16 years old I could be so far from home. Sometimes I still find it hard to believe, but it’s a decision I made to fulfill a dream I’ve always had.

Now, every day I wake up in a room that doesn’t feel like home, where every place I go sounds different. I miss my house, I miss being hugged or kissed and told how much they love me, I miss my friends, and sometimes school. There are times when I would like to teleport alone for a while, to listen to my language without having to mentally translate every word, or where it is not necessary to have to speak in English to talk to others, or where I am simply not alone, and where they do not look at me strangely.

But at the same time, there is something exciting about all this. Every day I know something new: a different way of greeting, a habit that surprises me, a landscape that leaves me speechless and breathless, also because of the distance we have to walk. I feel a little silly sometimes, as if I had to learn to live again, talk, make friends, but I also realize that I am the new one here, and I have to learn to live something new that I can and must adapt to, because otherwise I will not be able to enjoy this beautiful and unique opportunity that my parents gave me.

The cultural shock sometimes weighs, when I don’t understand a joke, everyone laughs but I get the face of ‘what’s going on?’, when I don’t know what to say or when I feel out of place because I still feel like an intruder and I think I’ll never be able to be like one of them, but it also has its magic. This exchange makes me look at the world with different eyes. There are difficult days, yes, where I cry until I can’t breathe, where I wonder what I’m doing here, where I want to get sick, but there are also moments when I feel completely alive, as if every experience here was leaving a mark on me.

Being in another country alone at this age is like having a divided heart: one part there, another here. And although I miss my home very much, I also know that, somehow, I am building another home inside me.

I may never stop missing my home, but now I understand that growing up is also learning to feel at home in more than one place at a time.

Martina Naomi Chinen, District 4851, Argentina –> RC Beroun, Czechia