@Danfoster 29 May 2022 edited

When You Don’t Belong Anywhere My Journey to Puerto Rico felt almost spiritual and sensational after being welcomed home with the smell of burning hot croissants emitting from the environment. I vigorously took a deep breath after looking around while deciding where to take a rest.

Stepping on French soil, things feel a bit foreign, My brothers are on vacation in another country and I don’t know when exactly there will make their way home. Speaking of emotion, I missed my mum but for some reason, I wouldn’t let her know how much I do. I wish I can say more, but making long sentences might be ambiguous here. Trust me, my first day home was worth the anxiety that befalls me during my stay in school. Feelings to hug my brothers were magically shrinking my heart like the cold winter at night. A week goes by, and I developed an inexplicable frustration within me. It was only me and my mum, I need the utmost presents of my two brothers around me. It’s almost like I am watching a movie after missing the beginning part. I lost it. I will be going back in a matter of days or probably a week at most.

It was virtually like I am a glittery Christmas decoration on a tree without anyone to interact with. My mum tried to neutralize my anxiousness, and at the dinner table, she asked me what I learned at school. that got me cracking, at my age, you are asking me what I learned in school for the whole semester? How will I start explaining it to you? I know it was her method to insight a conversation between us, but I wasn’t captivated by the exploit. But how is it fair of her to expect me to be the same person when I don’t have the presence of my brothers with me. I got terribly sick, coughing so hard and spending time alone in my room. At times, I blame myself for not having the courage to do better, perhaps, isn’t going home what I have always which for throughout my stay in school?

With closed doors came my angry mum, who wants me to go out and walk around the street, but trying to hold her nerves. “I don’t want to go anywhere mum” I returned. I tried as much as possible to solve my situation the way I know how to solve every life problem I have ever encountered but seems the bond between me and my siblings was psychic. The excitement of coming home started to wear off me quickly after I started to feel alienated and out of place in my own home. You will agree with me that when you come home from abroad, you have this much-idealized view of home, expecting unprecedented channels of excitement and having to beat your chest that you might not even want to return back to your travel. Coming home was nice, but it breaks my heart to realize that I feel like I don’t belong anywhere, maybe I am a bridge over the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe, just maybe, I am truly a foreigner everywhere I go, even in my homeland.