By Fishya Setiana
The German word “Heimsuchen” is one I’ve become more and more familiar with during this cold winter. In English, it literally translates to “Home-seeking,” as in searching for a home you can never return to. I think this word much better encapsulates what it feels like to uproot your entire life and move halfway across the world than the word “homesick” ever will. Because for the past 159 days since I left, the longing I’ve felt for home is less of an affliction and more of a yearning that gnaws deep within my chest, like a persistent infection that aches as I move through life.
Keeping with the German theme, there’s a quote by German romantic Novalis that I absolutely adore. “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere. Where, then, are we going? Always to our home.” Humans, I believe, will always be homeseeking. No matter where we are, or how far we are from home, we will always be looking for it in the world around us. Sometimes, when the wind surrounding Amsterdam’s canals carries just the right amount of sea-salt air, the salty scent of the breeze has an uncanny ability to abruptly transport me to the fried rice vendor right across from my high school. Suddenly, I am 17 again, I’m surrounded by people I haven’t seen in eight months, and we’re all laughing in the heat of the salt-sticky North Jakartan air. It’s in these little moments where the grief is greatest. It feels like the same sick lurch every time; a betrayal by my brain that leaves behind an awful empty feeling when I realize, salty breeze still in the air, that all I can do is yearn. It is a tragedy that in the 122 years since planes were invented, they haven’t found a way to make airfare cost less than twenty million (million!) Indonesian rupiah.
But perhaps the oddest thing about the whole ordeal is the guilt that clings to this feeling. Objectively, I am living the dream. This is what I wanted, wasn’t it? All the all-nighters in high school, the college essays, the cramming, it all paid off. I am living the life so many would kill for. I should be partying, reaping the fullest extent of what is impossible for so many back home. This is where the guilt is stemming from. Trying to balance the exhausting struggle between the fulfillment of living so many people’s dreams, and the grief of being ripped from everything I’ve ever known. This slimy guilt is a cloying and gross poison that sticks to the homesickness and sours it unbearably.
I have tried to battle this cognitive dissonance with varying levels of success. I have tried to make something out of myself here, to make the people back home proud. But recently, more and more times I have realized that the only way out is through; that the only hope to reconcile these two warring ideas is to settle for peace. I have realized that while I should be immensely grateful for all I have here, there is no point in fighting the grief of losing all I had at home.
Heimsuchen, aside from its more literal definition, is more commonly translated as “to plague” or “to haunt” in English. In the Cambridge dictionary, it’s described as “haunt [verb] (of an unpleasant memory) to keep coming back into the mind of.” Home seeking, with all of the guilt and loneliness and awful yearning that comes with it, is a haunting of the past on the present. It is a remembrance of a past self that haunts my current narrative. In her book Human Acts, Han Kang writes about uprisings, and how the human existence is like an ocean. How, like waves, we can crash into each other, fold into ourselves. I think that homesickness is a perfect example of this, of how past memories can rise up within us and crash into our present lives like a stormy ocean surface. Homesickness is proof that distance is not a metric of strength. That a place, 11,354 kilometers away, can weigh heavily on my heart and cause debilitating yearning.
Perhaps the idea of a static and everlasting home is a fallacy. “Home” may very well be a product of time rather than place. The places that define the settings of my childhood will probably get turned into parking lots, or shopping malls, or worse, and eventually, there will be nothing physical that tethers me “home”. Perhaps when I eventually return to Jakarta, I’ll find that the fried rice vendor has retired and my high school has gone bankrupt. I wonder, if that happens, if that quiet corner not too far from the sea will still feel like home.
In my constant search for home this winter, I have found it to be a little bit of a fool’s errand. As the days grow colder, I realize that “home” is not something to be waited for; it is something we can create with our bare hands. Home is as much something we return to as it is something we can build from the ground up, and in seeking for a home, no matter where we are or how far we are from it, we will always find it in some shape or form.
