I leave for the States on Thursday. We’ll be gone for six weeks, in four different states. Some work related stuff but mostly seeing family and friends. 

To say I have mixed feelings would be putting it mildly.

The trip back last year was hard. I returned to Cape Town in August really questioning whether I could move back to the U.S. I wrote about it here and have come back, again and again, to the sense of stateless, the feeling of being unmoored, that the whole experience brought on.

After spending most of my adult life outside the US, it surprised me how upsetting it was to realize I may never again call it home.

The idea that, as an American, I may never want to return to the U.S. is a hard one to reconcile. It’s not something I considered before. I took for granted that it would be there for me if and when I was ready to go back. Of course, I’m not even sure if the place I assumed I could return to ever actually existed, or if I made it up.

Even with all that said, the idea of being anchored to anything - especially my country of origin - has long been a negative for me. It feels heavy, constraining. It suggests immobility, and I like to move. Or at least to know I can.

The idea of being tethered - not anchored - feels a bit freer, allowing for movement on both sides. It feels grounded without being rooted. Connected at any number of points without being bound up.

So maybe home (for me) is more people than place. Specifically, my husband Chad. Our dog Xochi. The little touch points of our life here. Our friends in Cape Town, but also our dear parents and brothers and sisters and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and friends back in the U.S.

This may sound like semantics, but I sense it’s also a response to the toxic (white) nationalism and xenophobia that dominate discourse in the States right now. It all feels very Gangs of New York, and I have trouble identifying or engaging with any of it. That probably makes me unpatriotic and, even worse, a bad human rights defender - because I should really be back there fighting the good fight.

I don’t know what to say about that, other than I’m sorry. The farther along in this life I get, the more I just crave peace.

So, I’m curious - and not a little trepidatious - to see what happens over the next six weeks. 

Wish me luck.