Let's play a small game of geography. I'll give you two people, two cities, and two questions.
Where are you? Where is home?
The first question is easy. The second one gets complicated quickly. One of us is still in the country we grew up in. The other isn't.
So we decided to answer the questions separately, from wherever we happen to be.
Current location: Oran, Algeria
Distance from home: 237 km.
Borders crossed: 0
Technically, I never left.
There was no airport involved, no suitcase that had to survive a flight, and no passport control officer asking me where I was going. I moved from one Algerian city to another, which sounds considerably less dramatic when reduced to a sentence.
And yet, somewhere between those 237 kilometers, I started existing in a strange in-between place where I could no longer tell which city was supposed to answer when I said home.
It is a strange kind of estrangement because there is no obvious reason for it. I am still in my country. I speak the same language. I know the food, the weather, the habits, the particular chaos of the roads. I can go back whenever I want.
The map insists that I am still home. I am not that convinced.
RECALCULATING
I think what changed first was not the city, but my sense of direction.
There are places from my childhood that I could once reach without thinking. I knew which road came after which, which corner meant we were almost there, which shop had been there for as long as I could remember. Now I sometimes return and recognize everything while feeling strangely unfamiliar with it.
The streets have not necessarily changed. But I have.
That is probably the inconvenient thing about leaving a place without really leaving the country: nobody quite knows when you are supposed to have become estranged from it.
You simply return one day and realize that the place remembers someone you no longer completely are.
MY FAVORITE COORDINATES
Maybe this is why I remember home through details rather than addresses.
I remember my favorite bookstore, where I got all my first books. I remember picnic days with my family. I remember the route to my high school, and my grandma’s house, and how ordinary it once felt to know it by heart.
None of these things are remarkable on a map.
Maps are very good at recording where things are, and completely useless at explaining why a particular street can make you miss a younger version of yourself.
I don't think I miss an entire city. I miss its coordinates and the four walls that make home.
And now I have another city to learn by heart. Another set of streets and another collection of small places that will eventually become ordinary enough to miss.
LOCATION UNKNOWN
When moving, you don't necessarily leave one home and arrive at another. Sometimes, for a while, you carry the first one around with you while the second one is still becoming familiar.
So, according to the map, I am here.
According to my memories, I am occasionally somewhere else.
In reality, I’m stuck in between. I am learning that belonging is not as precise as a pin on a screen. You can be close enough to return and still feel like you have been away for years. You can stand in a place you have known forever and suddenly have to relearn where you fit inside it.
Distance from home: 237 km.
Distance from the person I was there: impossible to calculate.
The pin knows where I am, while I am still figuring out where I belong.
Current location: London, United Kingdom
Distance from home: roughly 1,400 km.
Borders crossed: the Mediterranean, the length of France, and maybe some of Spain, depending on the flight.
I actually left. There was an airport, a suitcase, passport control, and a plane taking me somewhere completely different. I have been in London for three years now, and when I first came here, I saw it as this garden of vast opportunities. Maybe a jungle is more accurate. I was a little spider or an ant somewhere in the middle of it, technically able to climb somewhere high, get somewhere decent, and build something for myself, but everything still felt like probability. A chance. Circumstances aligning in the right way at the right time.
I never came to London looking for somewhere to belong, and yet apparently I blend in anyway. When people ask me where I am from, I usually say Algeria before realizing they mean which part of London I live in. People are often surprised when they find out I am not from the UK, and I guess I do not really get the foreigner treatment here. It does not bother me. I just wish I could blend in that easily in the environment I actually consider home.
Algeria.
RECALCULATING
Growing up, Algeria always felt like the kind of place you were born in with the sole purpose of eventually leaving. Everyone dreams about Europa. There is this assumption that the moment you cross the Mediterranean, everything becomes better: people are fair, work is fair, systems work and opportunities are everywhere.
I was never completely sold on that idea. I came here with realistic expectations about people, culture, work, and money. What I did not expect was realizing how much I actually loved Algeria. People sometimes find that weird, and some probably think it is stupid, but I have been here. Veni, vidi, vici. What else?
Leaving gave me something I could never have had if I stayed. I can love Algeria without wondering whether I only love it because I never experienced anything else. I did experience something else, and I still want to go back.
Every time I book two weeks of annual leave, exchange some of my hard-earned pounds at the jeweler and go home, the first few days are bliss. Cinema with friends, eating out, our usual evening coffee, sitting around and doing absolutely nothing important. Then one thought starts creeping in: you have to go back. Suddenly there are eight days left, then six, then four. Everything starts feeling counted, and before you know it, you are packing the same suitcase again.
PREVIOUS LOCATIONS
In three years, I moved three times: Wembley Park, Tokyngton, and Acton. Sometimes I end up in one of my old neighborhoods, walk into a shop I used to go to regularly, or take a bus I used to take every day, and I just sit there remembering the person who used to take that route.
I remember the problems I had at the time, things that felt massive back then and mean almost nothing to me now. I remember how new everything still felt, then I think about everything that happened afterwards: the battles I had to fight, the things I had to figure out without really being able to ask anyone for help, assistance or advice, and the amount of growing up that happened somewhere between those addresses.
People who know me now know the finished version of those three years. They did not see what built it. London was an important part of that, and although I still would not call it home, I cannot pretend it did not shape me.
MY FAVORITE COORDINATES
London is the queen of the mundane. If you have enough time, some money and an umbrella, there are almost infinite things you can do. You can wake up with no plan, leave the house and freestyle an entire day, and somehow by the end of it you will probably have done something worth remembering.
I think I take that for granted sometimes. When I imagine what I would actually remember from living here, it is not Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. It is Pret coffee, the smell of Tube stations, certain bus routes and walking somewhere with my headphones on.
Music has probably been one of the strangest parts of living abroad for me. Sometimes I listen to something I used to hear while playing video games as a kid, reading my books, or just existing during some very specific period of my childhood. Now the same song plays while I am commuting through London, working out, or even at work, and suddenly I think about younger me.
I think he would be proud. Not because everything went perfectly, because it absolutely did not, but because of who I became through the good, the bad and everything in between. Sometimes that is when it hits me most clearly: oh, I live here now.
LANGUAGE SETTINGS
I missed Darija, probably more than I expected. Even in London, I take every opportunity I get to speak it, and I cling to it a little. I also realized that I am genuinely not the same person depending on which language I am speaking.
In English, maybe I am a little more fake. In French, probably a bit of a snob. In Darija, I am Walid.
Living abroad actually made me feel more Algerian because you suddenly have to explain Algeria to people, and then you realize how difficult Algeria is to explain. It is such a complicated identity to belong to. There are things only we do and things only we understand, contradictions that make complete sense when you grew up around them but sound ridiculous when you try to explain them to someone else.
Simplifying Algeria does not make it easier to understand. It just makes it less Algeria.
LOCATION: HOME
I am planning to go back permanently, and I do not see that as going backwards. For me, going back means regaining half of who I am: being close to the people I cherish, living near my friends and family again, and serving, in whatever small way I can, the land that saw me be born.
More importantly, I get to go back without wondering. I will not spend my life sitting in Algeria thinking that maybe everything would have been better if I had just left. I left. I saw what was outside. I built a life there. Now I know that limits are not always geographical; a lot of them are intellectual, financial or personal. Crossing a border does not automatically make you free of them.
I am also not afraid of not fitting back in. I always had my place in Algeria, and I am still the same person, just stronger now and carrying three years of experiences I did not have before. I do not think I am going to dramatically miss London either. There is not much to mourn about the convenience of a mundane life.
If one day I miss the Tube, central London or have five hundred things to choose from on a random Saturday, I can book a ticket for two weeks, exactly like I used to do when I missed Algeria. Except this time, when the trip ends, I will be going home.
I think the first time I sit somewhere in Boumerdès and realize that London is now somewhere I used to live will be strange, but mostly I think I will be proud. Like an adventurer who went away, saw what there was to see and came back ready to settle and fulfill whatever comes next.
And who knows, maybe one day I will take the suitcase somewhere else again. This time, I might not be alone.
Distance from home: roughly 1,400 km.
Distance from the person who left three years ago: impossible to calculate.
The pin knows exactly where I am.
I think I finally do too.
