There is a certain comfort and privilege in having a place to return to. A reassurance in knowing that some things remain even when so much else has changed. For me, home has always been a shifting concept, a collection of places rather than a single point on a map. But the place I was born, the one I am supposed to return to, still stands. It is familiar, unchanged in some ways, yet never quite the same since I left.
In Sweden, I took my first breath. In Sweden, I learned to navigate the world. In Sweden, my family still waits to return. In Sweden, I found out that I needed to leave.
I miss certain things when I am away. The quiet corners of a familiar forest, where the wind whispers secrets through the trees. The ability to walk paths I know by heart, to touch the past with every step. The library, where I first realized the world was bigger than the streets I grew up on. Books were my first escape, my earliest proof that life stretched beyond the limits of my childhood.
Upon every return – I cycle down quiet streets with my father, just as we did when I was a child. My mother stands in the doorway waving, just like she always does, watching me leave and return again and again. Old friends push strollers now, their lives filled with rhythms I was never part of, yet their presence is a comfort, a reminder of a past that still exists somewhere in the fabric of this town.
And yet, no matter how much I miss it, returning is never simple.
The version of me that once left is not the version that keeps returning. After years of living in different places and building homes in cities where I was once a stranger, I have become fluent in belonging elsewhere. I have learned the languages of new landscapes, let my heart settle in places where my name was once unfamiliar. To come back means to reconcile who I used to be with who I have become. To face the weight of expectation, the quiet assumption that home should still fit like it once did.
But I have seen too much, felt too deeply, to slip back into old shapes. I have known the thrill of stepping into the unknown, of making a home out of uncertainty. And I know now that home is not a single place, but the feeling of being rooted within oneself, no matter where the ground lies beneath your feet.
Returning is a privilege. To step back into safety, to be embraced by the known, even when it no longer feels like a perfect fit. And to know that leaving again is a choice. That the world still awaits, vast and unpredictable, ready to pull me back into its endless embrace.
Because while home may be where we begin, it does not have to be where we end.
Photos: Niusha Khanmohammadi
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