Читать книгу Heimat - Liv Hambrett - Страница 4

It’s easy and in many ways quite logical, to assume that by physically arriving somewhere new, the process is all but over. And what a process it is, one of farewells and flights and customs and overweight suitcases and getting acquainted with hard airport chairs, or indeed floors. That feeling – of relief, of tired, happy relief - when you lug your suitcase through your new bedroom door and fall face first onto your new bed seems to be, for all intents and purposes, the end. You have reached your destination – you have arrived.

In some ways, many ways, it’s enough just to be bodily somewhere new. Breathe new air, walk new streets, hear a new language. In many others, it isn’t. Because whilst you may be physically bounding about your new home, soaking it all in, you’re mentally rather scattered. When you move to a different country, there is a small part of you that assumes, or at least hopes, that on some level, life will continue with a degree of normality – with the added excitement of it all being on the other side of the world. As much as you are there for the new experiences, for the thrill of change, the oxymoron is that, what you crave quite often, is the stability found in the familiar. It makes it all a little less overwhelming.

This inherently conflicted state is, of course, rather conducive to winding up existing in two worlds; home-world and new-home-world. You doggedly keep one eye on what time it is in home-world so you can be sure to catch friends on Facebook and Skype, because these people are your comfortable old slippers. And you spend your weekends with a bevy of new faces, your brand new sparkly shoes you need to wear in and adjust to. You keep in the loop about everything that’s happening in your friendship circle in the home-world, via lengthy Skype conversations and feverish emailing, at the same time as trying to create a new loop in the new-home-world. You zigzag between time zones and languages and cultures, clinging and building simultaneously, waiting for the New to become as safe and known as the Old.

And then there’s all the run of the mill things you need to get sorted in order to actually exist in a new country; a house and everything that goes in it, a job, an identification number with the city hall, a tax card, a bank account, insurance, your first pay cheque, wireless bloody internet so you can stop stalking Starbucks. As you’re sorting all of this out, you begrudgingly accept a sparse bedroom and an ever sparser wardrobe are just going to have to do until you figure out how to fill in your timesheet in another language so you can actually get paid into your brand new-home-world bank account and stop living out of your home-world bank account that charges you a fortune to withdraw money. And you lie in bed at night running through all the things you need to do in order to function as an ordinary human being in the new-home-world and realise that, on some subconscious level, you expected far too much to happen overnight – and when it didn’t you were a little surprised, more than a little frustrated, and in some moments, slightly depressed.

I have come to understand, and it's obvious when you are spat out the other side, that arriving means cutting some ties with your old-home-world. Or at least putting those ties on hold as you anchor yourself to new ground. It is being a series of different numbers with the bureaucracy whilst your old numbers wait patiently at home for you to come back and file. It’s understanding a new health insurance system whilst the old one at home waits patiently for you to come back and have your wisdom teeth out. Arriving is having a place to call your very own and feeling that little well of comfort as you push open its front door. It’s having people to make weekend plans with. Someone to text on a whim for coffee. It’s getting mail. It’s living out of a local bank account. It’s knowing what night your favourite TV shows are on and what radio station plays the best music. It’s your first pay cheque. It’s committing aisles to memory in your local grocery store. It’s a new set of memories and personal jokes with a new set of faces to share them with.

It took me a while to arrive in Münster and I say that perhaps not realising, at the time, precisely how long it took. Longer than the two months I originally, optimistically, envisioned. My arrival process was hijacked by several months in Greece, a summer that had all the hallmarks of a Romansbildung, a perhaps then fitting prelude to arriving in Germany.

But I know where to find vegetable stock in the grocery store now, and I feel that little well of comfort every time I push open my front door.