Home Has a Way of Following You: On Belonging Between Cultures

Home has a way of following you. There is a particular moment many people who live abroad recognise. You're somewhere you've chosen, somewhere that has become genuinely yours, and something, a smell, a quality of light, a song from nowhere, pulls you briefly back to a place you no longer live.

To live abroad is to carry two places at once. It is to arrive in a new land with the imprint of another still etched within you. The familiar scents, sounds, and gestures of the place you once called home echo softly in memory, even as new ones rush in to take their place. You learn to navigate the rhythms of a different language, to shape your mouth around unfamiliar syllables, to stitch together belonging in a culture that is not yet yours. Slowly, new rituals form, but the old ones remain, woven into the fabric of who you are. In this way, home becomes layered, made not only of where you are, but of everywhere you've been.

Saudade and the Experience of Living In-Between

The Portuguese word saudade captures something of this feeling: a deep, aching nostalgia, a longing for what is absent but still lives in memory. For those who live far from where they began, saudade becomes a quiet companion. It is the memory of the sea you no longer see, the voice you no longer hear daily, the landscape that shaped you but no longer surrounds you. Saudade is not only sorrow. It carries a reminder that what you miss has shaped you, and that the act of missing itself is proof of love. To feel saudade is to become an invisible thread between past and present.

Home as an Open Question

This is the paradox of in-betweenness. For those who leave, home is never entirely here or there. It is both, and sometimes neither. You may find yourself at once rooted and unmoored, belonging everywhere and nowhere. The streets of your childhood no longer wholly recognise you, yet the streets of your present life do not entirely claim you either. And yet, in this in-between, something else begins to form: a recognition that home is not a fixed destination but an ongoing negotiation. It is an act of creation, of remembering and reimagining, of carrying fragments from one place to another and weaving them into something new.

This is, in the end, what it means to belong when home is between cultures. Some questions don't resolve. They just become more familiar.