"En toen werd ik een mens van de eeuwige heimwee."
or - "And then I became a human of the eternal nostalgia"
Sehnsucht
She moved from her town in Holland together with her husband to Indonesia before the second world war. She missed Holland but she had a great time working and living in Indonesia with the ocean as her garden. She drank tea and she ate so many eggs that she can’t eat them anymore these days. She made friends and she gave birth to her baby’s.
During the war she moved back to Holland. Then she realized now she missed her home in Indonesia as much as she had been missing Holland before. “Being homesick is awful, but it becomes bearable when times takes you through life,” she told me with tears in her eyes.
Does this mean that as soon as one moves from “home” to live somewhere else, one will get this thing called homesickness, for life?
Is it an illness that you would like to cure? Could it turn into a beautiful feeling that can be enjoyed when you realize that missing a place or a person only tells you that you are living a great life? I like to believe that we have the power to not become bitter.
Maybe time was easier on this old lady because she didn’t have skype/facebook/Iphone to “keep-her-in-touch” (stupid saying, creating falls hopes) with her other home.
Let’s all just log out and start living here, now on these pavements and around these stores and squares.
One could also miss a fictive world. An imaginary world or an imaginary friend that you had as a kid. Or a cyber world. A world that only exists online, where you created yourself in another character. You could also miss yourself.
What if cities weren’t build around this system of work/money/politics/history/landscape but around the people that you love. Imagine the population divided and spread around the world in such a way that everyone lives close to the ones they love the most. A fight or a break-up would result in moving away from that person. Making up, meeting your lover or making new friends would result in moving closer together. Imagine how funny that would look like from a birds perspective, dense clouds of people gathering and spreading all the time like a pulse.
Doesn’t it work like this in our mind? People come and go. Close or far from you and your emotions and feelings.
In this way, home could be more than one physical place at the same time. Home is where the heart is.
Text + pictures: Max.
