The first time I slipped up and called Vancouver “home” was the summer after my third year. I could see my mother’s face fall as we sat at our kitchen island and I reminded her I was flying “ho- to Vancouver” the next Saturday to start my summer classes. I wondered if she thought I could choose where home was. I wanted so badly to be able to choose my rainy piece of Vancouver.
Theirs. Yours. Ours. The lines of home blurred as my fourth year progressed in a whirlwind of work, school, a boyfriend and claiming Vancouver as my own. I spent my weekends exploring corners of a new person in all corners of the city, mapping my home on the inside of my heart.
Soon the local haunts I frequented with my friends and family on my few weekends at my other western home felt more like quaint tourist destinations than anywhere I was truly at ease. I could no longer see the places I had sat studying as a teenager as anything but relics of a childhood that was long-gone. Seeing my family, my dog and my friends no longer felt like a homecoming — these trips were now vacations from a life in Vancouver I loved as much as any holiday.
Home is solid. Home is immovable. Home is... suffocating.
A break-up ripped across the city and right through me at the end of the fall, seeming to turn my home into a catalogue of places we had laughed, walked, eaten and danced together. Each intersection I passed on the bus to school was only a few streets over from where we climbed together on that jungle gym. Every Evo I drove could have been the one I had driven him home in for the last time. I felt like Vancouver itself had spit me out into the cold rain, rejecting me as the days grew darker.
My parents knew how I was feeling, but each visit to them after Christmas felt like I was hiding from one home between the ribs of another’s skeleton, not willing to let go of the haven Vancouver had once been. I clung to my threads of friendship in the city, never entertaining the notion that my home could be what was tearing me apart — I could not fathom spending the summer living with my parents because that would mean accepting the city’s rejection.
But soon I didn’t have a choice. “I just need to come home,” I choked out to my sister over the phone as I stood on Cambie after a particularly difficult week, where the city and my humiliation seemed to loom over me no matter where I turned. My use of the term surprised me, but the prairies were the closest to what Vancouver had once been that I could think of.
I flew back and spent a weekend walking my dog by the river, eating dinner with my grandparents and studying for a final between bouts of crying. As I came back to Vancouver, wrote my exams and returned again to my family home in the summer, I felt as if I was hiding from a breakup with the city itself behind the miles between us.
Only as the summer months wore on and I found myself missing the friends and the laughter that had seen me through the last semester did I realize that Vancouver was my home to reclaim, not blame. Now in my final year, the city’s intersections are just crossroads we all have to navigate, its bus lines all taking us where we choose to go. I found freedom in tracing the places I used to visit in tandem and finding paths only single footsteps could traverse — in claiming space where I used to wither and leading where I used to follow.
Home takes time to build and rebuild, to find and to treasure, to believe and then to feel. Last week, I told my parents I couldn’t wait for them to visit, to show them all the places that are mine. I’m theirs too. Maybe home is where you choose to see past the pain to possibility.
Maybe home is a practice of belonging.