Here is what I know about home: it is sporadic and inconsistent. The only thing I remember about growing up is all the different places I had to grow up in. Leaving Peru and having to adapt to a new culture entirely and feeling torn between forcing myself unto this new identity and guilt for destroying the one I was used to. I went back, maybe because I wanted to find some missing pieces of myself that I might have left there, along with my name, before my name turned into a simplified, Americanized version of the name that was actually given to me. Maybe I thought it would clear some things up, as if looking at my childhood home after eighteen years since leaving it abruptly would bring back a memory as a streamline for where my life is now.
But it didn't because I have been shaped by a million things since then.
I went back to my roots and I found remnants of my life since before I could speak the language that now warps around my tongue. I went back to my roots and I found that I felt like a foreigner in the midst of all my people, where I once felt like I belonged. The more I surround myself with the unfamiliar and delve into the ghosts of my past, the more I find that I might not belong anywhere, and the more I want to keep running.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Maybe that's what we are meant to do. Maybe we are allowed to be a thousand different versions of ourselves before we find one that we really like. I am still being shaped, still growing amid all this life experience and changing environments. Still finding pieces of myself in every place and every heartbeat I encounter, sometimes feeling like I could have known them forever. I am still learning about survival and letting go and how to forgive myself for all the things that I haven't yet been, and the ones that I have been.
And now, getting ready to take another plunge, to try and find some peace of mind in a new city entirely, to try and find some more of those pieces, I am overwhelmed with anxiety of the unknown. But I hope that it's worth it.
