Not yet a local not still a tourist

The world of in between has captured me quite tightly in its grips and perhaps I am not alone in this grasp. Perhaps there are hundreds of other twenty somethings pressing shoulders with me as we attempt to settle into our places in the world. We find ourselves getting stuck between two worlds much in the same way salmon and avocado find themselves pressed together between rice and rolled up without much feeling of escape. When I trace back to the roots of my feelings of this relative displacement it lands me somewhere in the halfway point of August although perhaps it was even prior to that. It is not as though my living situation did not feel like home or that my friends made me feel out of place in fact it was quite the opposite. I felt myself nestling in, literally nestled into small apartments and spacious cafés with warm light. The stability and general content-ness with life was met with the knowledge that I would soon be packing up again and moving my life literally far beyond what I could even imagine. This is of course a privileged feeling to have however, while accompanying friends in the search for characterized home goods I was often reminded that there was a relative pointlessness for me to make these same purchases. My life was all about to change and what good would buying home decor do if it would be sitting in my parents basement for the next 6 months? Cue: feelings of displacement which sounds a little lame when being discussed against buying coffee table books but a legitimate feeling it is. And still it was not just physical belongings that elicited this strange feeling. It was sitting on the floor eating Chinese food accompanied with red wine and perching with a cup of coffee on a friends’ rusty fire escape before class. I could not quite understand the feeling until I came across this amidst picnic photos on Tumblr and alluring photos of the Amalfi Coast.

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again

- Azar Nafisi

In some ways it made me ache to stay but it served as a reminder that I was doing the right thing no matter how much fear was attached to the idea of change. Laying in bed on my first night in France the feeling of displacement materialized itself as I was now an ocean away from all the people and places that were not only familiar but natural and engrained in me much like the lines on my palm. I could trace my life at home with my eyes closes without having to glance to see what roads diverged where the question of it was that Oak came before Ash when heading West. Yet it was only the first night in a sweet but small room that did not belong to me that did not feel like home. Perhaps it was my jet lag that inhibited me to buy to the expensive sheets but it quickly felt comfortable. Unpacking my suitcases and the various ziplock bags of mini shampoo bottles and floss that my mom had carefully tucked into my suitcase on my behalf that reminded me of two things. That I was not and would never need to feel along and that I had the tools to create a safe space for myself despite being a place with a lifestyle that felt foreign to me. My first Sunday in Aix was spent at the neighbouring park sharing rosé in plastic cups someone had snagged from their hotel and breaking bread. That night we watched the sunset over the town and I could not help but recall the countless nights I’d watched the sunset accompanied by a best friend or even by myself. I thought of the ocean and how it was too many kilometres away from me but mostly I thought of my luck as the pinks faded quickly into violet and then the unmistakable blue of night which it turns out, looks the same no matter where you are in the world.