13 years since I came to Canada. I have now lived here longer than in any other country, except the one I was born in. I’ve been here long enough to develop a memory. Remember, how things were before? Remember that New Year we met at the Old Port, freezing cold, drinking from champaign bottle? Remember how we ran that half-marathon, it was thirty degrees in the end of September and the city opened fire hydrants to cool us down? Remember how we would buy bran biscuits and bring to the park to feed squirrels. Completely illegal, I know, but we thought that bran would be good for squirrels.

I have now lived in this city longer than enough to have children here, to grow, no, not old, but older. And still I don’t know if I am home.

Someone said to me once, when you say “home,” I never know where you mean. The truth is, I don’t know either. Home is wherever I miss most at the moment. It is wherever I care most about. I made my peace with the idea that I will never feel fully at home anywhere. The upside of this: there are many places I think of as home.

The only way I can make sense of home is when I think about it not as a place, but as a process. Home is a silent dance of the fireflies in my backyard on a June night. Home is lilacs in the end of may and peonies in June. Home is saying hello to st least five people on the way from the bus stop to the front door. Home is the familiar faces of dogs. Home is a tug of nostalgia.

Home is where one’s roots are, where one’s childhood memories are, but what if one’s roots are in one place and childhood memories in another? If I were to draw the shape of my home, it would cross the oceans and cut the national borders at an awkward angle. Home would be a very big place, or a series of very small places, like an archipelago lost somewhere in the ocean of memory.