There’s No Place Like Home

When you leave the place you call home for a place like New York City, there is little reason to feel homesick; life is just too exciting here. But after two months of continually reassuring friends and family at home that I’ll be able to handle living 20-odd hours away by plane will be a walk in the park. I begin to think about how wrong I am. These two months have been more of a long vacation than anything else. Now, that longing for home I once denied has finally caught me by the ankles. That emptying, helpless feeling that sinks in as I realize that going back home to stay means leaving Columbia hits hard. So, for all the practicalities, for the education, for the people I’m growing to love now—people on my floor, the people in my classes, the people I smile to and even the silent usuals I see in Butler 210, I decide to hold the plane ticket for summer. Understandably, I continue to miss the familiarity of home, miss the people I hung out with, and even miss the things I hated about home.

In my quiet times alone, my mind has had the tendency to spiral down into daydream – fleeting images and flickering clips of what used to be home. One of the scenes that come up most is the expansive open plaza in the heart of my city that is Garema Place. I can see it all perfectly; the branches of the old eucalyptus trees that held my hand through much of my childhood; the shrill squawk of magpies that reprimanded me for my wrong moves—their dangerous feigning swoops made on the unlikely premise of saving their young during October; the continual crunching sounds of falling skateboarders that taught me lessons in common sense and personal safety; and the hoarse voices of panhandlers who held brown paper bags and promised me that my generosity doesn’t feed their drug addictions. I even miss the uneven pavement that always made me trip and the dizzying fumes of the rude-smelling sewer gates, which reminded me to always look forward and try not to look back—sometimes a little too late. It is only in retrospect that the little things mean so much to me and have shaped so much of who I have become.

But even though there are these aspects that seem perennial in nature, Garema Place is forever changing. Public works of art are inducted into the Garema Hall of Fame, vandalized, cleaned, vandalized, and removed. The atonal orchestral works of the cafes and restaurants lining the walls of the Garema buildings play Spanish tragedies, Italian love songs, and Chinese proverbs, and the gluttonous magpies somehow always find themselves in the mix. I never watch the same tragedies, hear the same love songs, and learn from the same proverbs more than once. I worked at the cozy, corner bookstore selling books nobody really wanted, worked at the same cafe under different management, and made rich people richer selling products nobody really needed. Strangely, the constant push and pull and the capriciousness of my memories distance me from Garema, leaving me only those few, simple constants to console me. I felt that Garema changed faster than I could adapt—and having now abandoned home, I am left far, far behind.

A tap on the shoulder wakes me up from what otherwise looked like me concentrating very hard on a wooden chair. I try to snap out of it and make reason of it all. Garema Place is part of the city—cities have to change all the time, right? But to what end? Are we forced to become a continual social experiment of how individuals react to constant change? But to what end? Are we forced to become a continual social experiment of how individuals react to constant change? Are we being tested on how well we can adapt to an ever-changing environment? Living in the city or not, this issue affects us all. Do changes in the city affect the ideals, values, and demands of those in other areas? And do they affect people from the other side of the globe? Cable lines, airports, oil, and the celestial giants circumnavigating the earth say “yes.” I find satisfaction in discovering a microcosm of the world in Garema Place. As I desperately try and piece the scattered thoughts and memories together, I try and take Garema Place with me. Would it be foolish to try and use Garema as a microcosm to carry it with me and find it wherever I go?

I have to say, being in New York City makes it much easier. The more I stay here, the more I feel like less of a stranger—without saying I feel completely at home. Home to me is something so established that in order to transplant it somewhere else would mean physically finding my Australian ‘home’ in New York City. Thankfully, I think this city is one of the only cities that can come close to doing that. Can I stretch my brain to somehow see that Garema and New York City are in some way connected or related? I guess that’s my only point of consolation—my only tangible link home. It seems to me that New York City is one of those cities that does not have a real single identity—it’s a city that’s so different to each and every one of us that it finds its identity in us and we find our identity in the city. And as for those “I love NY” t-shirts, they really are just for tourists, right? We really should be wearing t-shirts saying something like “I love my NY” because we all have our own New York City—shaped by our previous experiences, our preferences, our dislikes, and most of all, our home.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.