By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti
“Asunción, today I miss you more than ever”
The words ring in my head like bells on a church, in quasi-melodic, rhythmic thoughts that won’t let me walk until I have written them down. I am currently in Windermere, but this plead first materialized itself in the foggy gloom of an Irish night; the sunless, not-quite-freezing weather on the death of winter brought forth memories of my city in late July, haunted by ideas of nation-wide incompetence and a certain wanderlust that made it all feel ever so inadequate back home.
And on a forest hike to my hotel by an English lake, a similar but all the more interesting thought comes to the spotlight:
“Caaguazú, today I miss you more than ever”
Isn’t it funny how we only appreciate things once they’re unreachable? I know I’m not the first pretentious essayist to write about homesickness and the human tendency to always lament our current state, but this particular brand of homesickness strikes me as peculiar because I have longed for this—forest hikes, all alone in the late winter by lake Windermere—for years before finally satiating my Lake District hunger on this trip. And yet, here I am, sitting on a bench in England writing about my hometowns.
This eerie longing for Paraguay has inexplicably followed me for the past couple of weeks, so while changing trains in Oxenholme I wrote down a mediocre poem to deal with that particular attack of yearning, featuring the lines:
“Fate, cruel lady, gave me a poet’s soul,
A wandering heart, no home of my own”
I imagine what you, my perfect hypothetical reader, are saying to yourself: please don’t burden me with your melodrama. But my lines encapsulate, albeit in an overtly tragic fashion, the feeling of inadequacy that has followed me most of my life and that became all the more latent these past few months: I have a very layered and complex identity, and my country has always felt too small to contain it. And I fear that in every place I visit, every place I idealize to non-existence, I leave a piece of myself. I keep on stretching: across Paraguay, across South America, across the Atlantic, across the Emerald Isle, across the Irish channel. My identity cannot be constrained to a city, a country or a continent, so I have spilt it everywhere I go.
As per Becca Rothfield’s seminal essay, “All Things Are Too Small”, this is one of those universal truths of the human psyche: the spatial insufficiency to hold our beings. But if we leave pieces of ourselves everywhere, what is our home?
That is precisely the epiphany I had in Windermere: home is but a constant spinning of narratives, the mythification of our own lives. “Home” is where the biggest part of your identity resides, but this spatial insufficiency to hold a person’s entire being means that our home is just a story we tell ourselves to quiet the cries for pieces left far away. This is, for the most part, perfectly sustainable, but once you move away for a long time the longing for yourself becomes unbearable. Unable to explain this longing, you express your grief as yearning for the spaces these pieces reside within; homesickness.
I have always been good at telling stories; my unhappiness back in Paraguay promoted a story of national precariousness, the longing for myself in Dublin promoted one of patriotism and homesickness. I believed these stories, I let them define me. But in the strangely familiar feeling of Windermere, both due to my long preamble for the trip and the similarities it holds with my beloved Caaguazú in June, I realized the story of my life and home is not one of places but one of feeling; of things and people, a story of experiences that have consumed me both physically and psychically throughout my life.
I am in the cracked pavement, the scorching Asunción heat that sticks to your body like a second skin. In the Dublin fog and the outings with my friends around The Liberties. I am in the pine trees that raised me, seemingly unending beyond the horizon at my grandma’s Caaguazú house, the pine trees along a footpath in northern England, and the pine trees waking me up in Marino everyday.
So while I will always miss those pieces of me left in Paraguay, I have spilt enough of myself in Dublin to add it to my narrative of home.
I once looked at the pines in Marino and yearned for a simpler time, for mate with my grandma and small-town gossip. Today I look at the pine trees in Windermere and not only yearn for Caaguazú, but also feel the silent whisper of a new thought forming in my head:
“Dublin, today I miss you more than ever”
And a few days from now, when I’m back to my dorm room in Ireland, I’ll wonder if the pine trees in Windermere miss me as well.