Home is where the heart is, they say.
It's been 6 months that everytime I think of home, I usually look back 6000 miles behind me. It always seemed to be an automatic reaction to hearing that word. Home is made up of the 7,107 islands I talk about in almost all of my presentations. There was basically nothing else I've looked forward to since day one but going back to everything that builds up my definition of home: Everything I'm used to see, do and hear.
Having passed over half of my stay, I can't help but ask myself the same question I had weeks before riding the plane going here: "What to exchange students do?"
Most of you have your own ideas: We go in another country, representing our own. We learn their culture, their ways of living, their language. We live with native citizens of the place. We meet people, then we go home. If any of you believes that we'll go home as the same people we were before coming, I'm sorry but I have to disagree.
You won't know it. You won't know how greatly attached you're becoming to the country you're in. You will not notice how much you start thinking like the people around you do. None, I believe, after your first quarter, is under your control. I'm not saying that you'll lose your identity when you become like us, rather, you will begin to create a new one, one that is an equal mixture of what you already know and the things that you never thought you'll be able to encounter. You will be a person without a concrete definition of what home is, because if you start talking about your heart, it is most definitely torn between the place you've spent all your years in, and the place that taught you the things you should have known back then.
I was on a trip before writing this. I've been to Switzerland, Italy and Paris. The idea of travelling has never been this appealing to me before, but it's not even that that shocked me the most. Going back to Clermont, I walked on the exact same places I've been on my first day in France. That particular day where I couldn't speak French and it was my first time to be alone in a country too foreign to my understanding.
6 months passed and there I was, as if reliving the same situation, except, I wasn't crying anymore. There wasn't a hint of being lost nor that fear of not knowing what to do next. My legs weren't shaking, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I was alone and didn't mind at all. That specific moment made me realize that as much as I want to believe that nothing has changed, a lot already did. Maybe there already is a big difference between the girl who was crazy enough to drag herself to Paris and this girl who walks on its streets, talks to its people and drowns herself in its collection of cheese.
France is home to me now. I can say that with all my heart pouring out. I have never known how comfortable I already feel in here until I left and came back. Coming back wasn't as sad as I thought it would be. Every single thing that was too foreign to me before are the exact same things I'm too familiar with now. Never in my life did I imagine that this is possible, but it apparently is, and no matter how difficult it has been and will be. I wouldn't change a thing.
Again, don't get me wrong. I love the Philippines a hundred times more than I ever did. I love my country so much that I bring it with me everywhere I go. It will always be home to me. It is still the place I'll spend the rest of my life in. No other country can replace my motherland. Maybe, just in this moment, I now know that the world wasn't built to be seen in just one perspective. And I guess they're right. When I go back, I will never be fully home again because a part of me will be left somewhere across the globe. Home, after all, isn't a place. Home is where the heart is.
