After 3 weeks outside of any home I have, August restored the balance. It showed all the blocks that have previously been hidden – or me truly opening up to my parents after such a long time. It was me going to the center to leave a note at Francesco’s place and accidentally breaking the elevator – or me and parents discovering that one of the neighbours has a portrait of Stalin in the house that can be seen from the outside. With my mom and dad coming to visit me, we got to know the Netherlands a bit better, and I am in love with the variety it has to offer.
I come home to Moldova and write (19.08):
The feeling of being home has become distorted: I have only vague ideas about which place it is. Is it here in Moldova? Is it in Eindhoven? Is it both or…none anymore?
Then I enter my room. This feeling of being home starts not with the streets of Chisinau or Moldovan hills – it is already a bit foreign to me. But whenever I enter my room, see my old paintings and books (many of which I still have never read), I want to stay inside so badly for more than two weeks or two months or probably forever – because it opens home straight to my heart, reaches it and starts healing everything that was, probably, unreachable by a – still –foreign country.
This feeling of home is of close intimacy, where you suddenly remember yourself when you were writing love poems when you were 14 or stayed till the morning without your parents noticing when 12. And whenever I am here, I am revisiting this 5-10-15-20 years old me with all the love encompassed in this room.
I am a half-stranger in my own streets where I used to know every second passer-by and walk to school every day, and even the nostalgia rarely reaches me. It is a weird understanding – that no place anymore is completely home for me, except for this my own room here, in the apartment where I spent 20 years of my life. But when it disappears and my parents, for example, move somewhere – what will I have left from home if not this tiny piece?
And then. Have I lost my home forever and ever or, on the contrary, acquired it? And if so, where is it – is it Moldova, Netherlands, or everywhere in the world? Or maybe, it is in my daily drawings, which were the only thing in my dream from yesterday I chose to carry even under the threat of an attack?
