Homesickness (from a McDonald’s in Budapest)

 It’s 10:26 a.m and I am in the outside of a McDonald’s in the middle of Budapest stealing Wi-Fi. My fingers are cold, I over-spent the money I had for the trip, and I am very tired. Gabriel and I booked the wrong tickets to get back to Mostar, so we came here to try and reserve a quicker way to get back home. If we can call our student residences “home”, of course.

The word “home” has interesting connotations. While it can be somewhat accurately described as a succession of four letters used to describe a place where you go to sleep every day, it is not exactly that. Home is the place where you come back to, no matter where you are. It is the Rome of our lives: the place where all our roads end up.

However, Rome also fell. At some point, it was more meaningful for all roads to go through Constantinople than through Rome. At some point, it was more useful for the center of the world to be in England than in Constantinople. And, at some point, it is better for home to disappear.

As I stop writing this article to look at the door of the McDonald’s to see if any employee is coming to get us away, I look at my luggage: a small carry-on with a questionable sense of blue-and-grey fashion. Where did I get it? I truly do not have a clue. My father just randomly appeared at my home with it, just a few days before I left.

At my “home” that I won’t be visiting for quite a long time. At a “home” that I grew up in, but whose ceiling is now too low for what I can achieve. A “home” that none of my roads go through it anymore. A former home.

It is very easy to take things for granted. I, for one, took my home for granted my whole life: even in the worst of the days in my school in Venezuela, I would always come back to find comfort in the arms of my mom or the warmth of my bedroom. A “bedroom” that has my name, but hasn’t been shaken by my steps in more than two months.

Two months that could be understood as a whole life, because I never got to travel with any of my friends in Venezuela and now, I am here with Gabriel, my friend from Brazil. A person that I randomly met at Split airport on the 26th of August, but with whom now I am willing to travel with. A person that probably doesn’t know as much about me as my friends back in Venezuela, but with whom I have been writing a lot of amazing stories in these months.

Some of them are fun, but some of them are very stressing. Booking the wrong bus back to Mostar is not a fun experience, but an interesting story. It is very easy to find the charm in stressful situations if you imagine them as written stories, and it is easier to make decisions if you see yourself as an intrepid reader rather than a teenager ten thousand kilometers away from home.

Home, again. A word that did not really cross my mind before but now is bouncing inside my head almost every day. A word that I did not say because I took its existence for granted, while it was not. I find very remarkable that we tend to forget the value of the things we have in our lives because we take them for granted.

I might be complaining about being stuck in Budapest, but by doing so I take a whole lot of things for granted. First of all, being stuck in a foreign country without speaking the language is an amazing opportunity: even if you feel at risk, you are privileged to feel such risk. No opportunity comes without risks.

One of the most amazing books I have ever read is A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. In one of the most stunning chapters of the book, the wife of the main character says that she is willing to die in their current house just to make it home. She is willing to take the risk of dying just to have the opportunity to have a home.

And yet, the reason why she associates home with dying is because of people. The trees around it could freeze forever and the landscape remain still for a thousand years, but it wouldn’t still be home if people were not born or deceased there. Home is not about places, but about people.

When I feel homesick, I do not find myself cooking Venezuelan traditional food or eating my reserves of Venezuelan chocolate. I do not listen to our traditional music or read our national writers, but I call my parents. Home is, after all, about people.

As I write this paragraph, it is 10:53 a.m. Our new bus leaves at 12:30 and I am waiting for Gabriel to come back from a motorcycle store he wanted to see here. As I see the clock going on and on, a little bit of excitement goes through my veins at the speed of light. Even though I will arrive to Mostar later than we would have with our original bus, every minute that passes is a minute closer to being back there.

A minute closer to being back with my people. People that I met just a few months ago, but people I would be willing to die for. And home is not about a place or a tradition: home is about people. And my people is not limited to Venezuela or to Mostar: my people could be all over the world and I would still die for them.

My home could be spread throughout five continents, and it would still be completely mine. Yet, I would still like to be writing this from the comfort of my room in Mostar or in Los Teques rather than in the middle of a McDonald’s in the middle of Budapest.

Nothing is like we would wish it to be.