Did it make sense?

Every time I go back to the city where I grew up, it goes like this. Nothing has changed, and nothing is mine anymore. The streets, the bar on the corner, the faces in the square: I walk past them like a tourist who happens to know the way.

Friends I used to see every day now have lives I'm not part of, jobs I don't understand, jokes I wasn't there for. We hug. We say "it's been too long". We talk for an hour about the old days, because the old days are the only thing we still have in common. And then there is a silence.

In that silence I understand that we don't know each other anymore. Maybe we haven't for years. We were just too polite to say it.

And the same question comes back, every single time: did all of this really make sense? Not just leaving. Everything: the studying, the cities, the work, the years away. All of it.

the deal I made without reading it

I left my hometown a few years ago to study somewhere else, and it felt obvious. The good university was not at home, the nice jobs were not at home, the future was somewhere else. Then one degree became two, one city became another, and the curiosity to try something new took me further each time. Nobody forced me. Every single step made sense on its own.

What I didn't see is that all those steps together were a deal: I traded being part of a place for the chance to see how far I could go. I never read the small print. Nobody does. It's only written later, and by then you've already signed.

And it was never about becoming someone. I don't care about that. I'd rather stay anonymous, which is why there's no name on this blog. So if it wasn't for a name, what was it for?

and then another country

Then I moved to another country, and that made everything harder.

When you move to another city in your own country, home is still a train ride away. A border changes that. Going back becomes a flight you book weeks ahead, a few times a year, and every goodbye at the airport feels a little heavier than the last one. And you don't just change address: you have to fit into a different culture, another language, other habits, other ways of joking and of saying what you mean. You learn, you adapt, you even get good at it. But it costs something, and some days you feel exactly how much.

Don't get me wrong: I live well here. My life is balanced and calm, in many ways better than it has ever been. But calm has a sound, and in the evenings it's the quiet of my apartment. Not sad, just quiet. Sometimes that silence is exactly what I need. Other times it's the loudest reminder of how far away everyone is.

the questions I can't stop asking

Only a few years have passed since then, and so much has happened. I've been lucky: I never failed at the things I set out to do, I love what I'm doing and it's going well, and I've worked with some of the smartest people I've ever met. I've traveled a lot, got further than I ever imagined when I first packed my bags, and I'm really grateful for all of it.

That's exactly what makes the questions so hard to ignore. If everything is going so well, why do they keep coming back? What was the point of it all? Was it worth everything I went through to get here? Does any of this reflect who I really am, or just who I became while I wasn't paying attention? And if I look at myself honestly, I'm not yet the person I'd like to be. What's next, and what would "next" even fix? Am I happy, or have I just become very good at moving forward, because moving forward is the only thing I know how to do?

what I lost

The loss is not dramatic. That's what makes it cruel. Nobody gets angry, nothing breaks, there is no moment you could point to and say: there, that's when it happened. It's slow. You miss one birthday, then a graduation, then all the small things that friendship is actually made of: the boring Tuesday evening, a couple of beers in the city center, a coffee when someone needs to talk. You're always "too busy", "too far", "next time". And next time keeps getting further away.

Distance doesn't kill relationships. It turns them into memories, and memories don't grow. They just fade, a little more every year, until one day you realize you're holding on to someone who doesn't exist anymore. And you start to suspect that, for them, the person who doesn't exist anymore is you.

There are people who are truly special to me, people I've carried with me my whole life. When we meet now, we're like shadows of ourselves, acting out a friendship we remember instead of living one. Maybe, if I'm honest, we don't even care about each other the way we used to. That's the part I don't say out loud.

Truth is, almost nobody back home is really interested in me: whether I'm doing well, what I'm working on, what I've worked so hard for. Part of that is my own doing. I was there, but a bit like a ghost: present, yet hard to read, even before I left. There are parts of my life I keep to myself, and not opening up is a convenient position: if you don't share much, nobody asks you questions. It's not that they don't care. I know they care about me, and I know they love me. But I've always been like this, and the distance only made it easier to stay that way. I'm trying to change that now.

And there is a second, quieter loss: home itself. With time, home stops being a place and becomes a time. I can go back to the city, but I can't go back to then. I'm a foreigner where I live and a visitor where I'm from. A guest everywhere. At home nowhere.

did it really make sense?

I'd like to end this with an answer. Something wise, something that ties it all together. I don't have one.

I could tell myself it wasn't a sacrifice but a choice. That's true, and it doesn't help. A choice you made so young, without knowing the price, still costs the same.

I could tell myself that the people who stayed have the same doubts. One of them once told me she sometimes wonders what she missed by staying. It was supposed to comfort me. It didn't. It only means that whichever road you take, you lose something, and you never find out exactly what.

I could tell myself that distance is not the enemy, absence is. That the few friendships that survived are the ones where both of us kept showing up. But then I count them, and there are fewer than there should be. And I know whose fault that is.

There is one call I think about more than I should. The one that comes in the middle of an ordinary day, from a number I don't expect, with news that can't wait. I already know how it goes: a flight booked in a hurry, a city that hasn't waited for me, and the certainty that I was somewhere else when it mattered.

So I still don't know if all of this really made sense. I just know that I keep moving forward, that the distance only grows, and that every year the silence at home gets a little longer.