Your home Vs the world: such an unfair comparison, isn’t it? How is it possible to compare your hometown to thousands of places spread globally? Trust me. The answer is: “easily”.

I left my hometown – Corfu – when I was 18 years old. That was when I moved to Athens to study. Then, I moved to Spain for 6 months when I was 20. Two years later, life found me in a diverse Spanish city, located in the north part of the country. A few months ago, I turned 25 in a small Irish village in west Ireland. Of course, I had previously been in Athens several times and I had made plenty of family trips abroad as well. But it is not the same. Travelling and moving to a place are two completely different worlds, having in common only the geographical position that the place holds on the maps. All the rest differs significantly.

Today, I was searching on Google maps for my new destination. What’s going to be next? Unknown. The only thing I know for sure is that I can’t stop. It’s like a virus that has attacked my immune system and I can’t resist leaving. But at the same time, this virus hurts. It hurts because it changes the balances within myself and the people who surround me.

Once you leave home, your home will never be the same again. Why? Because it losses it’s uniqueness. Now you have more homes. More cities. More hometowns. Now when you hear the word home you think of that coffee shop around the corner of your shared apartment in your university city, but also memories of a family dinner at the backyard of your house come to your mind, even that humid, rainy climate that made each day feel like a September evening can make a simple weather condition remind you of home.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been living in Ireland for the past 7 months. At the beginning, when I first arrived there, I faced an entirely new reality that had nothing to do with what I was familiar with in Greece. The rainy weather, the substitution of the sea with lakes and rivers, the farms all around, the castles, the drinking culture, the very friendly and kind- but still with a diverse friendliness and kindness from those of the Greeks- Irish people. As the months were passing by, all the above became more familiar to me and I was feeling more welcomed in their company. However, I was strongly missing home. And on that occasion, home was my country and not my city. I was firstly missing Greece. And then Corfu.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the nice Greek weather. Of the sun, the beach, the high temperatures. I was looking forward to get rid of my raincoat and my boots and go back to my summer self, dressed in shorts and sleeveless dresses. I was counting the days to see my family and friends again. And to have dinner with them at a fish tavern by the sea, admiring the colours the sun was painting the sky before diving in the water.

And here I am now. Back at home. Having dinner at that fish tavern, watching the sunset and the colourful evening sky. However, it is not the same. That was my perception of home, when home was my only reality. That was the perception of my reality when it was mirrored by home. I realised I was captivated by the idea of it and not by its real self. I might be doing the things I had missed again, but it’s a different version of myself doing them and it does not feel the same way.

Certainly, it is reassuring to know that you have a base you can go back whenever you want. And it is absolutely wonderful that your favourite people are here, living their -slightly different from what you had in mind – lives. But it is impossible to revive the life you once had there. Even if you do the exact same things, even if you create for yourself the same circumstances you had in the past you will find yourself trapped in the idea of what you thought it would be and not the reality. Because things have changed. Because you have changed. Because your home now is the world.

I know that during the following months I will have a new place to call home. And when I will be there, feeling homesick, I will try to remind myself that what I miss only merely exists. It lives inside of me, in a previous version of myself which is part of what I experience now. Home now lives within me. Because it has been converted into a feeling, not a location. And even if I am outside there, somewhere in the world. I will feel like home.

Fedra Mour