Saturday 17 January 2009

Home sweet home?

It seems I have been searching for a home since I left mine in 2006, a few months before I left for Korea. I had been living in the same apartment for seven years (!) and was so comfortable in my life there that I had to move to the other side of the world to pull myself out of the rut I was in.

Mission accomplished. Right?

I suppose. Since then, I have become a very different person, some new good qualities have emerged and there are probably some new bad qualities that I may not recognise in myself (any help on that one is appreciated), but I think for the most part I am a better person than I was when I 'left home'.

I think my desire (back then) to stay in one place, and not move, came from the fact that I had been moving all my life. Every two years when I was a kid and my parents were together, and then I left my mom's house as soon as I hit 18 and was able to. I guess I never really felt like I had a home. So, throughout most of my twenties, I lived in this wonderful (if a big dingy and old) apartment with some great (and some terrible) people, until I decided I was far too young to be so comfortable in life.

So, here I am, two and a half years later, living in yet another foreign country and I've decided to make this country/city/culture my new home. Not like Korea, which was always going to be short-term, but like that apartment that I found in my twenties, London will be home, for quite some time.

Now I just need to find that physical place, a space all my own, somewhere in this vast city that I can actually call home and not 'my room'.

I've been on the hunt for about a week and a half. I've given notice to my current flatties that I'll be out by the 1st of February. It's not easy here, though, to find somewhere that lives up to (or even comes close) to that feeling of home that I had in my apartment in Montreal. I know it always takes time for these things, I know I didn't feel 100% at home in the first year I lived there, so maybe I just need to give it time? The problem is, I haven't even seen anywhere that has the potential of being "home"...

I'll just keep looking. I know it's got to be out there somewhere. Everything else in London has fallen so perfectly into place and all I'm missing is a good home... so I know I'll find it... I'm just so tired of searching.