What They'll Tell You When You Leave Your Hometown
You know your story isn’t unique or unusual.
You leave your home country because you want to - you have to. To study, to work, to meet new people, to start over - to be someone other than what you are. To escape stagnation.
When you thought you’d always have a choice and your movements wouldn’t be spasmodic and governed by necessity, you only wanted to live in capital cities. That’s how you pictured your life abroad, and you’re disappointed when it doesn’t happen. But you let it pass. You should be grateful for what you have really. You’d like to think you’re the best and brightest, the one who managed to escape home and unemployment on merit - but you’re not. You are the privileged, the one who had the means to study and establish a new life in a foreign country.
You’re baffled by the pedestal you’ve inherited, simply by being here. People in your new country are eager to tell you how brave you are, comparing what you’re going through with their experience of going to uni - always surprised that you chose this place over your sunny homeland. They’re fascinated by your fluency in their language; they’re amazed that you are so committed to the job. You’re nothing like the Southern Europeans they’ve heard about.
Some people you meet are funny, or cruel. One thing is evident, though. You are your nationality, and that is the umbrella under which all of your traits are rationalised. Your new companions have to make sense of you, and everything has to be explained in order for them to feel comfortable around you.
You shrug it off. Weren’t you the same when you first moved here? You thought they’d be cold and disingenuous, and some of them are - but most of them are just people, and they listen to you without making assumptions, and you like them.
*
You’re always kept out of family conversations. It’s as if moving to a new country means you’ve moved to a higher plane of existence, untainted by the mundane. You only ever hear of happy occasions: weddings, graduations, job offers, as if they assume that being away from your home country is a struggle on its own and they don’t want to add to that. They tell you to watch romantic comedies, shop and go for coffee. They try to make you feel good about the fact that you no longer live in the country you were born. They compare you to your friends because you had the means to escape and they didn’t. You feel ashamed, because your friends are more talented than you, more hard-working and patient than you could ever be. They deserve this more than you.
You see lengthy, dramatic posts on social media from fellow exiles, pouring their hearts out on the internet about how they struggled when they first moved abroad, how they hated the weather and all the bizarre rules and cried themselves to sleep missing their families - and you wonder if that’s the norm. Perhaps there’s something wrong with you, because you never went through this. Their stories always end the same way: relieved they managed to persevere through their hardships and assimilate to their adoptive country. They have friends, a job they love, they’re living the dream, and they deserve it. They talk about what they’ve escaped and how dreadful the road-not-taken would have been, had they not been brave enough to leave.
Are loved ones the only loss you’re allowed to register? Much like the mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, you sacrificed your voice in the altar of mobility. You gave up your voting rights, knowing you couldn’t trade them for their equivalents abroad and neither your home, nor your host country will accept your input now. You follow the news back home but you don’t feel its impact, you can’t join protests to yell about things you have no stake in. You can’t even write in your mother tongue. Cooped up in their new country, the foreigner shouldn’t be talking about matters that don’t concern them. You weren’t brought up here, so how could you understand? In the eyes of some, you’re the problem itself. You should go back where you came from.
And so you do. Every year, as a ritual. You return home, and your friends treat you differently, and you’ve gotten used to that. Friendships need consistency - you can’t just slip away, then drop back into people’s lives and resume your relationship as if time and distance hasn’t twisted it, as if those same friendships were preserved in amber. You go back and you find them split into camps, and the only thing they have in common nowadays is you. You wonder if you should pull the plaster away, remove yourself from the equation, because you can’t bear to sit through another silent drinking session and prove again that you know nothing about each other. But you keep meeting, every year, as if to reassure yourselves that this hasn’t changed.
*
You return home with another tinge added to your accent, and you only notice when your family point it out. You hate the fact that your second language is becoming the dominant one at the expense of the other. You start planting direct translation of set phrases in your speech that make no sense, as if to balance the scales. Your mother keeps telling you how poor your vocabulary is these days, urging you to read books in your maternal language, to befriend others who share your fate and birthplace. She has come to terms with you living abroad - but she wants this new country to be the place where you live, not your home.
Your annual visit home has become more of an indulgence, like paying to watch the same film again and again because your favourite cinema screens it. You know what will happen, but it’s the comfort of the familiar, the predictability of the routine that’s really alluring. And you love the setting. You know your mum wants you to acknowledge this will always be your home.
And yet everything has moved and morphed into something uncanny. You’re a tourist in your own birthplace, buying souvenirs from shops you used to make fun of. You say they’re gifts for the friends you’ve made in your new country, but they mostly end up on your shelves, since you always thought it odd giving someone a souvenir from a place you visited to remind them that they never did.
Somewhere in the middle of the capital that’s gobbled up your memory of home, there’s the open-air cinema with the graffitied wall: a miniature version of the city that raised you. Boxy buildings with terraces, their roofs packed with antennas pocking the sky - a grid plan that makes no sense. The graffiti has stayed unchanged on that wall while roads shifted and swelled, buildings were abandoned and boarded up, monuments were privatised. The places you fell in love with no longer exist and you never visit them. There is nothing for you here but the nostalgia you’ve cultivated to be your protector against assimilating in your new home. You will always be connected to the capital and you will always think of ways to exist there in some indeterminate future. You could do what the others did, the ones who call you sentimental and ungrateful: sharpen your corners to fit the space your surrogate country allows you, adapt, soak up the new and blend in. Your memories are faulty, an idealised version of what happened in a city that no longer exists, but they are precious, and drawing from them doesn’t mean you’re tethered to them. Any future home won’t really be a home, but neither is this city in its present shape; they’re all places where you live from-then-till-then and you’ll be happy in them.
And if not, you’ll move on. They’ll keep changing without you, just as much as you will grow in their absence.
Written by Evey Damianopoulou
Evey is a Greek-born writer and translator, whose work has appeared in publications such as Litro magazine, Athens Voice, Libero, and Nutshells. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Southampton and was featured in the anthology 47,842 words. She’s currently working on a narrative nonfiction book that chronicles her experience of Athens during the rise of the Greek anti-austerity movement in 2010s.