Going Home for a Visit and Not Feeling at Home: A Morocco Story

The new home is not yet fully home either.

By Neil Solomon · 2 min read

Picture a couple named Susan and Martin. They moved to Morocco a few years ago. This autumn they fly back to the town where they grew up, for a family gathering. They land, they step off the plane, and they expect to feel a click of belonging.

It does not come. The streets are right. The accents are right. But the coffee tastes odd, the pace of conversation seems fast, and by the third evening Susan finds herself thinking about the market near her flat in Morocco.

I have read this account again and again. People describe a feeling I would call displaced. The old home is no longer fully home. The new home is not yet fully home either. They are somewhere between, and the visit makes it plain.

What I think is going on is simple. A home is made of routine. The shop where they know your name. The shortcut you take. The way you answer a neighbour. After enough time away, those routines belong to someone else, and the place goes on without you. That is not a loss anyone caused. It is what time does to any place you leave.

Many people feel sad about this at first. Some then feel something else, a sort of freedom. If neither place is entirely home, then home can be something you carry, made of people and habits instead of an address. I do not think everyone reaches that view, and no one should feel they must. But I notice that those who do tend to speak of it with calm.

There is also a practical question. If the old home no longer feels like home, what does that mean for the choice to stay abroad? A visit can be a useful test. If you come back and feel relief to return to your new place, that tells you something. If you come back and feel pulled to stay, that tells you something, too.

"I kept wanting to go home," Susan says on the plane back, "and I did not know which one I meant."

Martin looks out the window. "Maybe it means we have two."

"Or none yet," she says, and smiles.