If you happen to talk with an anthropologist and ask them how we can define the concept of "home", they will tell you that it depends on many different variables that are related to the culture, the family system, the idea itself of what a house should look like or be for.
The first six months of 2020 were quite intense for me - and they would have been despite a pandemic breaking out. At the beginning of this year I questioned myself on where I feel my roots are, and I wondered why I am so unattached to them.
When the pandemic broke out in Italy (early March) I didn't have much time to think about where I should've spent my lockdown - for a moment I considered going back to what I used to consider "home" before, but then I realized I was not drawn to it because I had now a new place to consider as such. It was a tough decision, but in the end - maybe for the first time in my life - I did what was best for me and not what others expected me of doing.
For a while, I thought I am extremely adaptable and I easily feel cozy anywhere I go: it took me a bit over a day to consider my Australian host parents' farm a home when, last Summer, I spent a week there; my house in Lisbon became a home one morning as I was studying on the balcony, one-two months after moving in, and I think the home-status for my apartment in Rome arrived even sooner than that.
Since my birthday in mid-June coincided with Italy reopening the internal borders - meaning we can now easily move around the country again - I decided to celebrate it visiting my parents and friends in the North. The experience of catching a train was itself an adventure, even though the situation was very much like it used to be before the pandemic. When I arrived in Milan, I experienced a weird feeling since everything was almost as it used to be, but you could tell something had happened. The main difference presented itself in ads and signs in public spaces: instructions on how to behave on transports are everywhere - on doors, on poles, on the ground - and your path in metro stations is drawn by round stickers on the floor, which makes everything look like a real-life version of some sort of apocalyptic videogame.
For the first two/three days, I was disoriented, lost. That was home, but the not the one I had left in February. I was in a familiar place, yet it looked foreign and slightly off. The first moment I felt as if I was in my place, was when I was driving on my favourite road in the countryside; windows rolled down, sun shining in the sky, "Wonderwall" by Oasis came on the radio and I immediately felt home. So I realized that home is not a place, not really - is more of a conglomerate of places, feelings, emotions, people. A house is nothing without the people who make it a home inside.
As I hadn't seen my parents and friends since long before the lockdown started, we had a lot to catch up on but everything we could seem to talk about was the Covid: what we did during the quarantine, what we thought, what we are afraid of now that things seem to be better. My parents live next to a busy train station, but all they could hear for weeks were just sirens from ambulances speeding to the nearby hospitals; some of my friends could never leave the house for months because only one person per family could go shopping for groceries, and living with your parents meant one of them usually took care of it (once or twice per week, as controls were much, much more severe than they used to be in Rome).
"It all seems like it was some sort of bad nightmare", we commented when we met up on my birthday to celebrate. Being out and together was still new, and at first everyone was a bit wary of the others. As I looked at them, I thought that they looked older, and something in their eyes (or in mine?) had changed. Some of them went through their parents' illness and slow recovery, some lost a relative, others did not meet grief but went through being laid off work and seeing their life projects postponed. I listened to their stories, realizing how different their experience had been from mine.
When you meet up with someone you haven't seen in a while, all you can talk about is the lockdown - at least if you are from the North or were living there. The pandemic in Italy is an extremely traumatic experience, and I am quite sure we should all undergo some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder treatment - as individuals or as a society - because, by how fast we are removing all that happened, I believe we are in denial. I myself realize that I am being much less careful these days, despite always wearing a mask outside and in public spaces I am less wary of other people. Yesterday I happened to come across a friend I hadn't seen in years and my first instinct was to hug her - for a split of a second, everything was back to normal and that was an innocent, affectionate gesture.
The past three weeks were almost as tough as the lockdown was on an emotional level, for me. Being back home, seeing friends and family, turning 27 added to other changes in my life that I hadn't anticipated, and all of that piled up. As I was there, the same thing that I had already experienced in Lisbon, during my Erasmus, happened: I wanted to be in two places at the same time, because both place are, for me, home. And when home is linked to people, to feelings, to memories, it can be anywhere - it can be two places at the same time, it can be a place you have only been living in since recently.
While I was home, I truly felt like a chapter closed down, and a new one is opening. I'm excited to see where this is going.
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