you never know how far from home you’re feeling

I keep a running tab on things I’ve compiled as “quintessentially Toronto.” A fistful of major streets that stretch on for miles is one, with names that are so customary because their origins stem from somewhere else. I was reading Transcription by Ben Lerner while sitting on a bench on College Street, and I was so immersed in the story that I could not separate the College Street the protagonist was on in Provincetown from the one I was on in Toronto. I half-expected to see him walking towards me at a leisurely place, fumbling with his broken phone. The streets are abstruse in their own right with so much numbering and added specificity; for example, when you hear the words 1164 College Street West, it conjures an image in your mind that is so singular in comparison to its name. Because as you walk the streets, you start to know them. You know their proximity to the subway (TTC), which cafes have usable outlets, who works where and when. Without noticing, you have joined a world you never knew existed. Then, it becomes concrete, and you can’t imagine a life before it. I know exactly where that is because I have been there before.

To this list, I’ve added vocabulary. Bathrooms are “washrooms,” affectionately formal and prim, like what I would have chosen to name them if I were a little girl. Every place, even the gym, has something called a “party room.” I have never seen a place so keen on celebrating everyone and everything. I have been mid-celebration, mid-moment, many times over the past few months, feeling an out-of-body experience hit me out of the blue. It happened on my birthday, when I sat by the pier with my friends, in the middle of a spin class, doing karaoke in Spain, with my coffee half-drunk. It’s like I am watching myself from afar, a person living moments I would have never predicted, and thinking to myself: you should really be writing all of this down.

I don’t think I am in danger of losing or forgetting these moments; it is more so that I want to make sense of them. It is in these beautiful and wonderful days that I feel most alive, but also that I feel immense gratitude for life and all the experiences that have led me here - some of which have been good, and some of which have been bad. Being away from home allows me to understand my home. It takes a level of distance from the things I know so well to slowly begin to unknow them. Unknowing intrigues me. I want to know if my room in Kuwait smells the same, if anything knew opened up in the three months that I was away, if I will feel like the same version of myself when I return. Unknowing strengthens my love and piques my curiosity; I want to know the place all over again.

Social media allows me to see all the things that have taken place in my absence, but I don’t physically feel the time passing or these events occurring without me. What I feel, rather, is a huge disconnect from them. They are not simultaneous, just different, belonging to someone else. Like I am in an alternate reality where I don’t have a book club, for example. Like this is something I watched someone else start from afar. It’s nearly impossible to come back from a long trip and feel unchanged. But my home changes, too, because it consists of people who change. Nothing can stay the way it was when you left it.

Maybe accepting this is what allows me to feel so far removed from the things that happen without me there to witness them. It brings me back to the whole idea of witnessing. So much is based on our perception. I am the person who interprets all my experiences and chooses to see them in a certain way. I refer to going back to Kuwait as going “back to reality”: I am going back to reality next week. But why isn’t my time away also part of reality? Why are all my memories and lessons perceived as other-worldly; why can’t these two worlds join together? I experienced so much love and joy and fulfillment over the past three months. It feels wrong to separate these things from my life when they’ve recently shaped it. Inherently, I know that both experiences are valuable to me. And the thought I keep coming back to is that I could make my everyday life a bit like the one I live when I leave it behind, if only to continue to foster happiness every day.

Another thing is unique about Toronto: people know where Kuwait is. Some of them have even been there. When I tell people that I am from Kuwait, they ask about my family, the war. “How have you been sleeping?” A woman from my book club went there to visit her friend from university. She said Kuwaiti people were some of the friendliest she’s ever met. Many Lebanese and Palestinian people have had a parent or grandparent live in Kuwait for X number of years. Through these new people, I am able to see things about my home that I overlooked. The streets are warm and easy to navigate. They had the best machboos of their lives in Mubarakiya. Ice cream hits different in the middle of July.

Then, I ache for my home. I grow shy and red-cheeked, like hearing news about a former friend. In every foreign observation, I long to be the observer. I want to know my home again. I want to experience it myself for the first time. And without noticing, a portal opens up. The two worlds I’ve long separated fight to join together. I tell these new friends about Kuwait. I show them photos. I teach them the Arabic words for things and places. I compare Kuwait to its neighboring countries so that they have a better grasp of the things I’m saying, and in that process, I can feel my familiar friend revealing themselves to me. I am so far away, but also right there.

I wonder why these feelings are familiar to me and then I remember that I felt them before. What I am describing to you now is basically one-quarter of the plot of my novel, which is a coming-of-age story and a love story and a family saga and a dark comedy. It’s been almost five months since I completed my sixth and final draft. My protagonist feels this way when she returns home after years of absence. But I also feel this way about my writing. I miss it when I am away from it. When I don’t touch it for a while, I wonder how it’s doing, if I can reconcile the world I created before to the one I am creating now. One project is Kuwait and one is Toronto and another is Spain and a fourth is London. All of this is to say I have found a home in my writing the same way I have found homes in places and people.

Just like fiction does not make sentiments any less real, neither do the things that happen in my presence or absence. The life I am living here is real. The things I am missing out on are real. I don’t know if there is a place for me everywhere in the world, but I am in charge of carving them out for myself. I can love who I am here and love who I am in Kuwait. I can use the novel experiences of summer to shape who I will be when I’m back. I can change and stay the same. I can grow, learn, take risks, love fully, regret, and find strength. I don’t need to limit my life based on geography or what is “realistic”; a word that looks so silly when you type it out. If the characters I create can impact me this deeply, then so can my individual choices, which I can shape however I’d like to.

This summer felt like the precipice of something. I think back to how I was observing myself and it makes sense now. I am looking back on this period of my life in retrospect. I am fond of these memories; they make me smile. Somewhere, ten years have passed, and I think that these are the days that snowballed all the changes that came after. I stood on the brink, maybe, not knowing it yet. Not knowing that my life would change forever or that I would change forever. Aren’t they the same thing? Probably, yes. I am the same now as then, the same here as there, the same inside and out. Everywhere I go holds pieces of me, and I am the only one who can glue them together.