Three days before flying back to the US, I was shopping at a supermarket with my sister. As I was filling the cart with my favorite Macedonian goodies to take back with me to Tucson, I ran into a neighbor who worked at the supermarket. She was excited to see me, gave me a hug, and paused to chat. She asked me the few usual questions about my vacation, and then she locked her always-curious gaze at me saying in a somewhat more serious voice: “Ok, let me ask you this. Are you ever planning on returning here for good?” 

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that question from people. Acquaintances, neighbors, family members, and people I barely speak to have asked me the same countless times. But it was the first time I responded the way I did. “I don’t know. I have no plans,” I said with a smile, and a level of calmness and confidence that I had not embodied before. The expression on her face communicated confusion. She wanted to know what I meant. She needed more. I shrugged my shoulders. I said that I didn’t know how to answer that question. “I might move back one day,” I said, “or I might stay in the US until I retire.” I said I would perhaps consider the possibility of splitting my time between Macedonia and the US at some point in the future. I might move to Europe in a few years, or I might live in America forever. “Who knows,” I said. “I have no plans.” I truly meant it. She claimed to admire my mindset, even though her surprise with my answer stayed on her face until she went on with her work.

I understood why she was taken aback by such a response. And coming from me! In the community where I grew up, I had always been perceived as the ambitious girl who knew what she wanted. I was the girl who had answers to all the major future-oriented questions. This fickle response wasn’t fitting the image that was constructed of myself and had stuck with many of my people even after all these years. And a large majority of my Macedonian community does not believe that you can or that you should be living a life filled with “maybes.” Not at this age, at least. You are supposed to pick a side. You are supposed to find your place, if it hasn’t already been found for you, and call it home. You should know, because not knowing means you are uselessly floating, and being buoyant often means you are dangerously drifting away from the shore where things are clear, and stable, and known. 

Almost every third person I run into or catch up with while I spend my summers in Macedonia is curious about my idea and feeling of home. Where is it? Where do I feel like home? Is it Macedonia or is it America? It’s always “where.” Sometimes their curiosity melts into surprise. Other times it turns into disappointment. At times it merely dissipates. Whatever the response, people generally proceed to provide their perspectives, always uncalled for. “Why would you ever come back here,” they say. People like to use the word prosperity a lot in the Balkans, so opinions often reference this concept. “There is no prosperity here,” they add. “What are you going to do? If you ever come back, you WILL regret it. Going back from the life you are living now to the life we have here…phew! You will hate it. And I bet by now America feels like home.” Others are more encouraging. “You will be fine. The kind of person you are, no doubt you will find your flow here as well. At the end of the day, people in the Balkans know how to LIVE. And this is your motherland. This is your home.” (I am often tempted to politely tell them I didn’t ask for their opinions. I doubt that would make any difference.) 

People talk to me about home a lot. Home, to them, is the place where you were born and raised. Home is where you speak the language effortlessly, and you know the local dialect, and you are familiar with the habits of the people, the food, and the culture, where the humor is dark and the jokes are not censored. Home is where nothing is odd because the odd has become so normal that you take it as familiar in a homey way. “You will forever be a stranger in a foreign country,” they say. From people who have never been in the foreign country where I live, I hear scenarios filled with presumptions about my treatment by the “locals” here, about the never-ending stream of struggles and difficulties that I must be facing. People try to show empathy, and yet it often comes off as pity with a sprinkle of admiration. It’s an odd combination that I don’t know what to do with. 

It is somewhat ironic, yet incredibly relieving, that the people that talk to me about home the least are the ones that know me the most. They bring home without bringing up home, here and there, there and here, time and geography irrelevant. Among them, I am speechless, soft, stripped of the shiny shields and shining unshielded. I may not clearly state where home is, but I sure know how home feels — like this, precisely like this, I tell myself in a language of feelings, my very own. 

Amid the cacophony of shoulds and how-coulds and what-ifs, there is a rejuvenating comfort in coasting through the moments that just are. That is where I float. Picking a home to anchor myself affirmingly has been a feat that neither appeals nor makes sense to my current self. I have gradually been able to abandon the homequest, that cumbersome venture that I have subconsciously picked for myself somewhere along the way in the past decade. We all need to belong. But the truth that makes the most sense to me now is that we do not need to belong in one way, to one place, to one space, not forever, and not at once. We are allowed to abandon and revisit our decisions. We are allowed to evolve our selves and to alter our choices. It really isn’t about a single place, one country, a fictional boundary. It is about a universe of all the people, all the shared joys and sadnesses and loves that transcend distance and borders and zones, all the grounds where you can come forth with your shiny bliss and scattered mess. And such space doesn’t exist in the realm of the “either-or.”

There is an immense liberation that nestles within when instead of choosing and contracting, one resorts to expanding and exploring. We learn to build space to house all the contrasts, the thick sediment of paradoxes and conflicts that settles in our hearts and minds when we pack up and leave once. From there we learn to hold the pain and sadness of leaving one home, and the joy and relief of arriving at another. We can hold it all, I have witnessed. We do not have to know. We do not have to pick a side. Not right away, and certainly not on other people’s timeline.

To create your own canon of existence sometimes you start by defying the communal one. To gain clarity for yourself, sometimes you leave the confusion to others. And to find your lightness and finally get to bask in the robustness of your life, you might just need to leave the shore
and drift
and float
between choices, 
selves
homes…