Could This Be Home? — Suzey Ingold

Walking through Stockholm felt like composing a love story in my head, with every icy cobblestone and glow of a street lamp against the setting sun. As the song goes, there’s no place like Stockholm.

It’s odd, this affinity I have for a city I don’t know all that well, that I have visited little more than a handful of times throughout the course of my life. Something in the city welcomes me back time and time again, even as I continue to struggle to find my place with its people.

I don’t know how to explain feeling simultaneously so at home and so uncomfortable, all at once. Maybe, I feel at home with the city: with the place, and with my surroundings. But uncomfortable with the people, with no sense of community.

But for such an insular people, I didn’t feel lonely, despite my week of relative solitude. In Stockholm, I felt like I could just be – like there was already a place for me there, just waiting for me to slot into it.

My time seemed too short, as always, the sun beaming down the day I hauled my suitcase toward the ferry terminal. It takes barely ten minutes to leave the city behind when the ship pulls away, the rise of the buildings melting into the horizon as we wind our way through dense, forest-laden land on all sides. The water is a rich blue beneath us, carrying us east to somewhere that I have known as home for my whole life – even if I’ve never lived there.

I fell asleep to the black night of nothing outside my cabin window and awoke to nothing but sea and sky. Somewhere between Sweden and Finland; between lands that felt such a part of myself that I could feel as home in the middle of the sea as I could on land.

The Helsinki skyline inched into view and my heart seemed to swell in size. It had been close to three years since I was last in Finland – the longest period of time I had been away in my entire life.

My first hours in Helsinki were spent troubleshooting through a game of musicals Airbnbs, the kind of unique on-the-road challenge that any traveller will know well. When the extent of your resources are whatever you have on you in that moment, with the very pressing reminder that you will have to find somewhere to sleep that night.

By the time I signed into work for the day, my sense of calm and ease had returned. I was freshly showered in a beautiful apartment; the fridge piled full of some of my favourite foods which I so rarely got to enjoy.

“I hear a rumour you’re in Finland,” the head of my department commented as we logged on for our weekly meeting.

“I am.” I smiled. I’m home.

I settled quickly back into the city like it was my own; grateful, too, to be back in a country where I could speak the language fluently. I knew that I could move to Helsinki tomorrow, and be happy. That I would find my place, that I could slip into the fabric of life here and be comfortable.

And yet, there was a quiet to Helsinki that didn’t satisfy my city-dweller soul in the way that Stockholm had. That even Rome had nestled its way into my heart, a surprising discovery for a city I was sure I wouldn’t like more than to visit.

But every step through the streets of Helsinki made me doubt whether the bustle was what I really wanted – what I needed. So much so to turn down this beautiful corner of the world to call home.

I broke up my travels midway with a visit ‘home’, if I can use the word here, to see my family. At the very least, it reiterated my desire to return to Europe – and my desire to do so without returning to the United Kingdom. But it did little to help the muddle of thoughts that twisted around my mind, questioning: where can I call home?

Paris awaited me, this majestic city rich with a history of art and literature that makes it nearly impossible for me to ever leave her. Dragging my suitcase down Rue St Denis felt like coming home, as bars spilled over onto the street and the orange glow of the sunset took to the sky. Maybe, this was home – or, it should be.

The longer I spent in Paris, the more I realised that I could not picture a future where I didn’t spend at least some amount of time living there. Maybe it was the ghost of writers past calling me to stay, the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways; hauntings of another lifetime. If it were only so easy, to shack up in Paris with nothing but my words to sustain me and find a different kind of life in the streets of this city.

I had thought it would be simple, my search for a new home. I had thought I would quickly know where it was I was meant to be, a decision coming to me in little more than a day or two. I had made bigger decisions before, in less time. The reality was turning out to be much more complicated.

Not only had I found many places I could gladly call home – more than I had even set out expecting to – I had a real sense of not wanting to stop in one place too long at all. That if I could spend a year, maybe two, simply travelling from place to place – a month there, a month here – I could continue to enjoy the sense of sheer peace I had felt over the past weeks spent in Europe.

But life is not so easy. Life has bills and obligations and a whole host of other things that feel difficult to reconcile with that kind of lifestyle.

For now, maybe all I can be is grateful that, as my nephew once said, “there is so much world out there!”