Home is people

Most people who know me may already know this, but my family and I recently moved. It was many years in the making, and a big move. The kinds that involves crossing continents, getting shipping containers, etc.

I definitely felt strange feeling leaving a country I've called home for over a decade, and to whom I still find myself aligned in a lot of ways. The weeks and days leading up to the move itself are amongst the most emotionally raw and powerful days of my life. Going into the move, and knowing myself, I would have imagined that a lot of the emotions I would have felt would be mourning the change - the loss of routine, of familiar places, or familiar things.

But that wasn't true. Not even a bit. What I mourned was the change in relationships and friendships. My family had grown substantially over the past decade and half - with children, but with found family as well. And the last few weeks was all of us, collectively, realizing that things were never going to be the same. Not to say that the same relationships couldn't still be deep and beautiful - but they would be different, in a way that we didn't know. It was uncharted territory. How would I talk to my friends across time zones? How would my kids and their kids still know each other growing up so far away from each other?

Three months into this move, and we've found new rhythms to life - new familiar places and things, new familiar routines. But the hole left by missing people remains. C'est la vie.