Arriving at HOME on left: Wordless

When I moved to Morocco in 2015, every day held a story that I was eager to share with anyone who cared to read. By contrast, returning to Canada in 2019 has left me largely wordless. I had not written a thing since my return, when I came across a “receiving letter” that my thoughtful employers had written for all departing staff before we left. The idea was to prepare us, and the people who care about us, for the “reverse culture shock” that was about to hit us when we returned to a home that no longer felt like home. Here is that letter, and the thoughts it provoked.

So here it is: all that I have left unsaid since the day four months ago when I made my last voyage between the two places that have been home to me for the last four years: one, the place of my upbringing and my roots, the other, the place of my uprooting, and re-rooting, my redefinition of myself as “one who goes forth.”

Living abroad changes a person.  How can it not? Everything changes when you find yourself adrift, bewildered and language-less in a land of perfect strangers.  Eventually the strangers become acquaintances, and then friends; and then the friends leave and the strangers change, and you find yourself adjusting to a new flavour of life every single year, while the people you left behind seem to be swimming along as always, without you.  You find yourself doing things and going places that fill you with all of the wonder of existing in a big, bold, ever-expanding world; and even as you exhilarate in this new grandness, you yearn for the comforts of the simple, boundaried past.

None of this is new.  It has been the underlying theme of everything I have written since my first leap across the sea.  But what I have not said, and did not expect, is that the leap homeward is every bit as conflict-ridden as the journey forth had been.

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It’s glorying in the happy return of kale and celery to my diet; it’s borderline horror at the cost of cauliflower and the flatness of the fruit.  It’s the comfort of knowing that the people I missed so much are now just a short drive away, and the frustration of being too occupied with other things to reconnect with them as I would like.  It’s the welcome problem of furnaces set too high, and the odd nostalgia of lighting a fire in a warmthless box of concrete.  It’s the haughty presence of blue boxes everywhere (except where they should be most), and the reports of shiploads of recyclable waste in landfills.  It’s the ethereal so-fa-mi-re-do wafting out my neighbour’s window as I walk to my backyard composter in the sunshine; it’s the silence of the people next door the day the moving truck arrives.

It’s the pleasure of an autumn bike ride down tree-lined streets to visit the library or vote in an election; it’s the uncomfortable awareness of poverty and helplessness in a place where all are supposed to have a voice and a basic standard of living.  It’s making large purchases in the world of warranties, insurance, and the rule of law, and it’s the jarring reality of broken windows, stolen laptops, and beleaguered police departments.  It’s settling in what has been repeatedly rated “the best neighbourhood in Canada,” and wondering which desperate soul it was who broke into my house.  It’s well-groomed bike paths on the banks of the Thames River; it’s returning before dark, because the streets might not be safe.

It’s the anticipation of making straight-forward transactions in establishments with bona fide price tags, and the ensuing furor of dealing with car dealerships as shady as the toothless opportunists in the tourist markets of Marrakech.  It’s the sensible tendency of motorists to stay between the lines, and the belligerent cursing of a fellow driver at an imprudent lane change that would have been perfectly acceptable in the buzz of Casablanca.  It’s the ease of interacting in a universally shared language, and the unease of not quite knowing what to say.  It’s the warmth of friendly, innocent hellos, and the shock of being catcalled, even here.  It’s the reassuring predictability of common social norms, and the disappointment of finding those norms to be cold and without life.

It’s the professional satisfaction of returning to a modern school system with standardized practices and progressive jargon; it’s the frustration of returning to find antiquated technology, inconsistent pedagogy, and a paucity of the basic resources required to do a job well.  It’s the checked-and-balanced justice of the democratic process, and the political posturing and labour unrest inherent in collective bargaining.  It’s equitable working conditions driven by mutually ratified contracts, and the unhappy realization that those same contracts are as revocable as any in the private realm.  It’s the matter-of-factness of working in an established system; it’s not knowing the name of the teacher next door.

How can I be equally enamoured, and equally critical, of both of these perfect, imperfect places? How can these geographical coordinates be so wildly different, and so fundamentally the same? How can the juxtaposition of social isolation and intimate friendship assert itself so congruently in two entirely different circles? How can the intersection of those circles seem so distant, even when common friends are not so far away?

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am not unhappy to have returned; nor do I regret having left.  But I want both, and neither of these worlds.  I want the best of each, and cannot have it without also embracing the worst.  I want my porch under the maple tree, and my balcony’s Atlantic breeze; I want both security and the thrill of change.

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I was not settled there; I could not be, without the elements of here.  And touched now by the elements of there, I can never be settled here.  I look into myself now, and find all the restlessness and contentedness that have ever coexisted in me, diminished and magnified in ever-fluctuating increments.  I wonder if there is a better place to be, a better way to be: a way that integrates these two segmented lives.

Coming home is complicated.  It has been defined by the roller coaster of job applications, interviews, rejections, acceptances, paperwork, and exponential learning curves; by apartment-hunting, car-shopping, insurance-buying, and the other miscellanea of adulthood; by address changes, eye appointments, and errands easily undertaken in the space of an afternoon; and by the slow forgetting and sharp remembering of things as they once were.

So please be patient.  Please befriend me.  Please invite me for a cup of tea.  And leave me alone, and let me be, and everything in between those two shores of solitude and surroundedness.  Greet me with a double-kiss, as if you are Moroccan; fry me bacon and be my friend, as you’ve always been.