The Flight That Took Me Home (By Leaving It)
My father found home in possibility. My mother found it in freedom. And I thought I didn’t need one, until I realized I already had it.
I have this unrelenting need to move. To break away. To leave.
But the question remains: Where is home? What is home? Not the kind made of four walls and one permanent address, but the kind people point to and say, this is where I’m from. My father left his behind in Africa and never looked back. My mother outgrew hers long before she had the means to leave. And I? I’ve been moving since I can remember, chasing something I never quite learned to name. If home isn’t a place, then what is it? And when do you know you’ve found it?
I spent the past days offline, traveling with my family. That’s why, for the first time since January, I skipped my weekly coaching session with Chat GTP. But sometimes, better than a session is simply living a little. And that’s exactly what I did.
In doing so, I was reminded of this constant need I’ve carried since forever: the urge to move. Maybe not just to move, but the quiet pride in not being bound to a single place, not belonging to a geographically constrained lineage.
My Ageographical Parents
Maybe it’s my parents’ fault or their creation.
My father was born and raised in Africa, but one day he left and never went back. Now, he belongs to another country: his parents’ country. When he talks about those first 14 years, it’s never with sadness, longing, or nostalgia. He’ll say the horizons there felt wider than what he found back in Europe, the weather was warmer, the people more open, maybe even a little happier. But it’s all delivered matter-of-factly. A quiet joy from something that once was. No grand emotion (and my father is big on emotions). So maybe it was never about the place. It was about the experience of vastness. Of possibility.
My mother tells a different story. Her first years were spent in a place she never really belonged to. Her dreams stretched further and wider than the four walls of her childhood home could contain. So she rebelled. She sought belonging elsewhere: new cities, new geographies. She still returns to that childhood town because her family is there. But for her, too, it’s not about the place. It’s always been about the love for the people of the past, and the freedom of her present.
So maybe they’re the first ones responsible for my lack of attachment to any one location. For never needing a fixed place to feel rooted, to feel I can stay and belong. We built homes inside different walls, in cities across two continents. The constant wasn’t the location, it was us. The safety that, no matter where we landed, we belonged together.
Maybe all those early years of changing cities, schools, and friends just taught me that the playground isn’t only the schoolyard. The playground is the whole world.
I never had time to even consider limitations, because I never lived them. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in the same town as your parents and their parents before them. And in a way, that’s incredibly freeing. There were no expectations, no local gossip, no rules about what was possible. There was only forward.
So maybe, in moving me from place to place, my parents weren’t taking anything away. Maybe they were sewing wings on my back, and I just didn’t know I had them on.
The Vastness of Earth (That Took Me Years to Understand)
It’s funny what your mind accepts as normal or brave. Because I never saw geographic limitations, I never had to fight hard to leave, move, or find home in a new place. That instinct didn’t come from sacrifice. It came from curiosity and adventure.
But I still remember the first time I felt geographically claustrophobic. That feeling of being unable to breath because you feel hopelessly trapped.
I must’ve been in preschool, one of the few I briefly attended. A teacher took out a globe and said, “This is the world, the planet we live on.” Then she pointed to a tiny dot and added, “This is our country. And this little one? That’s our city.”
And I remember feeling sick. That was the first time I truly understood: if I started walking, I couldn’t walk forever. The planet, my home, was finite. It had edges.
Until then, my world had felt endless. I used to go on long road trips with my family, and there were always more roads, more places. In my mind, roads didn’t end, they just stretched on into new adventures. That day, though, I realized they didn’t. That they could end. And I felt a deep, almost physical anguish. A strange kind of grief for a limit I didn’t know existed.
What no one explained at the time, and what I’ve come to learn slowly, through living, is that yes, the globe has borders. But the world? The world is vast beyond comprehension. Walking every road would take longer than a lifetime. And even if you returned to the same place, it wouldn’t be the same. And neither would you.
Now I know: this Earth is infinite. Not because it has no end, but because there will always be more to discover. Places, people, stories. And versions of ourselves we haven’t met yet.
A Departure That Feels Like Splitting in Two
And now here I am again at an airport. Once more, a consequence of that restless curiosity and sense of adventure. This time, it’s in honor of my younger brothers (not so little anymore) and their dreams of building a new life abroad to study.
And once again, I’m reminded: we are always becoming.
I’m at the airport leaving the country I’ve called home the longest. The place I probably belong to the most. The one I have a passport and a native language for. And yet, I’m flying home, to a faraway apartment filled with my books, clothes, bed, and kitchen utensils. The walls and bricks of my current life. My eyes start to water.
What is this strange ache of leaving home to go home?
Instead of belonging to two places, it just feels like I belong nowhere, and everywhere.
The longer I stayed with my family, the more I wanted to stay. The more we talked, the more follow-ups were needed, follow-ups that don’t quite work over a phone call. The more memories we made, the more I craved a lazy Sunday to debrief them. A lazy Sunday with no plans. Just existing together.
But I know how this works by now.
The flight is enough time for my body and mind to shift realities. By the time I land, I’ll be the version of me who lives that life again, the one with the phone with the local data plan, the bed, the books. That other life will feel distant the moment I step a foot outside the plane (though it never really is).
And just as I was convincing myself I was stepping through a portal of change, it was time to board. I looked up and noticed a gray-haired man ahead of me with more ear piercings than you'd expect for his age. It felt oddly familiar. And then I saw him clearly: it was him!
A writer I deeply admire.
He writes beautifully about life, death, and traveling to strange corners of the world like North Korea. I instantly wanted to ask him: How did you do it? How did you become a writer? How do you begin to write a book?
I wanted to tell him how I read his book on the death of his father, how I felt that grief in every landscape he described, as if the trees were also aching in pain. How I went searching in secondhand bookstores to find his older work, and how thrilled I was when I finally did.
But then… silence.
My mother always said that an author finishes saying everything they need to say when they place the final period on the page. Maybe that was her way of saying: never meet your idols, because you might discover they’re just as human as you are.
So I said nothing.
And I took that strange coincidence as a quiet reminder of why I was boarding this flight. Why I keep leaving home to find it again. This time around to find the time to write more and leave my corporate job behind. It’s a last stretch.
Because I have changed geographical homes so many times, but I have always found home on my writing.
