I hadn’t given much thought to this question until I was confronted with the thoughtful bursts of a girl in her 20s emerging into her own life. The question of home first inserted itself into my mind when I moved to Vancouver, and until then, home had always been my 50’s house in DC. It was almost right after the universe had been brought to my infantile perceptions, that I was carried to this destination in a white thick cloth, securely lodged in my mother’s arms. In it, I watched my little brother grow up, my parents become weary of my teenage angsts, my hairstyles change, friends come and go, and the recurrent New-Years parties, set in a disguised garage better suited for the occasion, that undulated with waves of excited voices and dancing steps to Congolese music. Over little past a decade, I accustomed myself to the sounds of the cracking wooden floors, the clinking silverware, and the intermingling of my family’s voices. Quarrels and joys, winter mornings and snowy nights, slow Sundays and stressed Mondays, this house had witnessed and been home to it all.

This sense of home would be re-asserted daily during my continuous and stable living there with my family. But come 6th grade, we moved to my mother’s parents’ country of origin: Mali. There, home could only be temporary. It was given we’d only be staying for a few years. We’d rentend out our D.C. house, thus renovating it and painting the walls with new bare layers veiling our previous existences. The new house in Bamako could only be a temporary home as I’d known my real one was just on hold for the moment. Though even as such perceived, this house couldn’t really encompass the same definition of home as that of my original one. She didn’t know our stories, and we didn’t know hers. We were as much strangers to this house as it was to us. Three years could only change this by a small margin.

Things were different once I returned to DC. The continuous history I’d once been involved in creating within it was now staggered somehow. Plus, my teenage years gave me a different outlook on things that altogether rendered me with a more unaware sense on the significance of home. My underlying feeling was that home was where I felt comfortable in psychological terms. It expanded from my house to all the places where I’d recurrently gone to between home and school, and where I built up stories of the moments within them. This was the time of my teenage bliss. However my teachers’ constant pressings on where I was to go to college, and what I should be enticed to study, cut too short for my liking, this social and familiar time, transfiguring it into a mournful few years in which I bitterly and inwardly resented my impending separation from my familiar nest. 

It was a few years into studying in Vancouver that the question of home made its appearance. There I’d felt most at home in first year. I’d made friends with similar cultural backgrounds to my own, making it easier to joke about things like 5 hour long Nigerian movies, and displaying my cultural homes. This wasn’t the case in my years enrolled in a British high school. My backgrounds came off as too outside of the general sense of sameness and belonging. In second year I moved into an apartment, filling it with objects and photos from my DC home, in an effort to recreate what I longed for. It didn’t prevail. Roommate troubles, the diminishing gregariousness of first years settling into second, mixed in with my philosophical crisis on the makings of my society, and the lifelessness of these imported objects, all contributed to rendering Vancouver the furthest place from home. So much so, that after 3 years I got fed up, packed my bags, and returned to my home in DC. 

Although this house and its stories of my family will probably remain a defining element to my sense of home, I’ve seen through moving around the world, and traveling for shorter times, that home is truly, as they say, where the heart is. I’d first heard this sentence long ago, agreeing passively to it, as if it was an evidence that required no further reflection. But in the globalized world we live in, the heart is not always in a place it can call home. When starting a new job, or moving to a new country, we often feel strange to a place to which we may be even more strange. We can grow attached, indifferent or disgusted by its new foreign customs. We might get along well in it, or we might have trouble and settle into a passive and mechanic existence with no love for the place we’re in, thus permeating our willingness to see a place as home, or we take up a new destination we hope will better tend to our hearts’ comforts.

Home is where my heart is, and my heart has always lied in those of my mother’s and father’s, the beats of its affection always guided towards sincere family members and friends. The constantly changing physical landscapes of my whereabouts have complimented these beats. This is why my family house in DC, the little French bakery I’ve worked at since I was 14, Costa Rica with my best friend Tori, the dusty roads of Ivory Coast that lead to my cousins’ house, and the South-Eastern French rural paysages and its innumerable outdoor lunches, are all places where I’ve been made to feel a belonging. Having a globally nomadic lifestyle, my sense of home, outside of geographical concerns, has at its essence, always been where those who make me feel accepted and whole are.