I bought a postcard for you, Home. It had the fortress printed on it, the one that sits above Salzburg keeping watch. There must have been a break from the rain the day they painted this postcard because the sky was impossibly blue. I thought about writing Wish you were here, but it felt too small for the kind of missing I was doing, and I didn’t want my thoughts to be mistaken for a Pink Floyd metaphor.
So I slipped the 4″ x 6″ in the inside pocket of my bag, where it’s been living between going to class and traveling new cities. I keep finding it by accident, a paper ghost of everything I meant to say to you and didn’t.
Dear Home,
You’d hardly recognize me. I enjoy hot coffees now, I walk everywhere, even in the rain. I say Grüß Gott to strangers like its natural. But I still count euros like dollars, and sometimes I forget where I put my keys and where I usually keep them — because I still think of them as house keys, not hostel keys.
You’d laugh if you saw how many pictures I’ve taken of windows, trees, and the hills. Something about the way the light lands here feels like you: soft, familiar, but just out of reach. I keep trying to capture it and relive that feeling, the way I used to take pictures of sunsets from your back porch, always thinking the next one would finally look the way it felt.
I thought the distance would make me miss you more. But instead, you’ve started to blur around the edges as I live my new life here. I can’t quite remember which stairs creak when I come down them, or which cabinet holds the mugs. You’re becoming more of an idea than a place.
Sometimes I try to recreate you here, Home.
I turn on one lamp instead of two, to try and imitate that comforting lighting in my bedroom that I love. I make pasta in a pot that is too small and pretend the sauce tastes the same. I tell my friends stories about you— how you’ve been there through all stages of my life. They nod politely, but they don’t know you.
There are moments, though, when you surprise me. You show up disguised. You’re in the café down the street, when the barista knows my name and how I don’t like my lattes too sweet. You’re in the comfort of my pillows, in the natural beauty of the mountains, the steam of my lemon ginger tea, and you’re in the hum of the washing machine when the whole hostel is quiet. I realize, suddenly, that I’m not lonely, just still.
I used to believe home was a noun, a solid thing with an address and a doormat. But lately, it feels more like a verb, something I do and something I carry. I find pieces of you in the rhythm of the streets, in the laughter of people who didn’t exist in my world three months ago. Maybe home doesn’t always have to be a place we go back to. Maybe it’s something we learn to build again and again, wherever we land.
There’s a strange freedom in that. It means I can miss you and still belong here in this chapter of my life. It means I don’t have to choose. It means that when I go somewhere new, I won’t be starting over. I’ll just be adding another room to the house I’ve been building all along.
I found your postcard again today. The edges are ever so slightly curled now, the ink beginning to fade from the raindrops that got in my bag. It doesn’t look like something meant to be sent anymore. It looks like something meant to be kept.
So I’m keeping it.
Not because I forgot to send it, but because I think I finally understand why I never could. You were never supposed to be on the other side of a message. You were supposed to be in the spaces between, in the things that don’t fit on paper.
I used to think that a postcard was created to prove something, that it said Look, I made it, or, Look, I’m fine. But now I think it’s the opposite. Maybe not sending it means I don’t need to prove anything anymore. Maybe I’ve stopped trying to translate what this place has made of me, because some parts of change don’t need to be mailed home; they just come with me when I return.
So consider this my letter anyway, Home. Not stamped nor sealed, but written all the same. I’ll see you soon, though probably not as the person who left. You’ve changed, and so have I— and I think that’s how its supposed to be.
“Wish you were here.” But then again, you always are.
DU Abroad 