It happens on an ordinary Tuesday, walking somewhere in your adopted home abroad.
There might be the sound of bells chiming somewhere behind you, the particular slant of late-afternoon light off the buildings — and for half a second, you're not here.
You're standing in a crisp autumn, cold air, wood smoke, a version of you from a different decade entirely, admiring the way the light hits the kaleidoscope of falling leaves.
Or you're back on a hike somewhere else, on a trail, mid-stride, feeling the rhythm of a walk you finished years ago.
It isn't a memory you decided to have. It's more like… your body changed the channel without asking you first — and by the time your mind catches up, you're already back in your “here”, slightly disoriented, still walking.
That's the part that gets strange when you've lived in enough places, for long enough: your body doesn't file places the way your mind does. Your mind keeps a timeline — this year, that year, before the move, after it. Your body keeps something more like a floor plan.
Your body still knows where the light switch is in an apartment you gave up the keys to a decade ago.
Your body still finds the rhythm of a walk in a country you haven’t set foot in for decades.
The body as an archive of places you’ve lived
Your body doesn't just remember what happened in a place. It remembers the place itself — the geometry of it, the pace it asked of you, the version of you that learned to move through it.
This is different from nostalgia, and different from homesickness. Nostalgia is something you feel about a place, on purpose, usually with some distance. This is closer to reflex. It shows up uninvited, on a Tuesday that has nothing to do with anywhere else.
One person I spoke with in my research had lived long-term across two very different countries, years apart, and described something I hadn’t heard named so precisely before: parts of their soul left in different places, in a way that can never be fully reassembled. Not a metaphor they reached for lightly but more of a description of what it actually feels like to have built real life in more than one country: pieces of yourself distributed across geographies that don’t get to be in the same room together.
Another person I spoke with, who’d lived in several different countries over the years before eventually settling somewhere new, described something related from the other direction. On visits back to the place they’d grown up, it read as sensorially “louder, more intense” than it used to — not because the place itself had changed, but because their nervous system had recalibrated to a different rhythm elsewhere, and now measured the old country against the new baseline. Their body wasn’t confused about which country they were standing in. It was just running the comparison in the background.
There's a real, well-documented basis for a body that holds places this precisely.
In the early 1970s, the neuroscientist John O'Keefe discovered "place cells" in the hippocampus — neurons that fire in response to specific locations and, together, build something like an internal map of every environment you've spent real time in.
It isn't a mechanism reserved for people with difficult histories. It's just how brains are built to hold place — which is part of why this shows up as often as it does for people who've simply lived in more than one geography long enough for their nervous systems to actually learn it.
For people who've moved once — a single before, a single after — this might surface occasionally, gently.
For people who've moved multiple times, over years or decades, it can mean carrying several of these bodies at once.
The one that still knows a particular staircase. The one that still finds the pace of a specific street. The one that flinches, softly, or softens, just as involuntarily, at a sound from a city you can barely picture anymore.
Neither loss nor ownership
There's something genuinely rich about this.
You are not a person who lived in one place. You are a person whose body carries the layout of several. That's not nothing — it's a kind of fluency most people never get to have, even if no one ever taught it to you on purpose and even if you never asked for it.
And there's also something disorienting, maybe even a little grief-inducing, about a body that keeps referencing places you can't return to, or that don't exist anymore in the form your body remembers.
The city you’re picturing may have changed. The apartment may have new tenants who’ve repainted over the version your hand still reaches for. Your body isn’t wrong to remember it — it’s just remembering something that, in the present tense, is partly gone.
It's not a sign you haven't "moved on." It's what happens to a nervous system that's been asked to build fluency in more than one place, more than once.
Where this tends to appear
This hasn’t earned its own number in my long‑term life abroad pattern tracker yet. It shows up often enough across the research that it likely will, but for now it sits alongside a related, already‑named pattern: what I’ve been calling the Interior Country, the private inner landscape some long‑term expats build that isn’t defined by any single culture. This is its more literal cousin — not just an inner landscape, but an actual archive your body keeps of literal places you’ve lived in and experienced.
Here’s where it’s showing up in my research so far:
It tends to concentrate in people who've made more than one real move — not a vacation, not a semester abroad, but the kind of stay long enough that your body had to actually learn the place rather than just visit it.
It shows up in returners, whose body still carries the floor plan of somewhere they've since left.
It shows up in people managing more than one home base at once, where the body is quietly holding two or three sets of directions simultaneously.
This is still another emerging pattern in my research, but it belongs on the same map as the low-grade hum and migratory grief that I write about on Edgewalkers Collective.
This is yet one more way long-term life abroad gets written into our body — not just in how safe it feels, but in what it still, involuntarily, remembers how to do.
Sitting with the places your body still holds
Your body holding onto a place doesn't mean you're stuck in it. It means you built real fluency there, and fluency doesn't disappear just because the address did.
If you want a slower way to sit with this — not to explain it, just to notice where in your body a particular place still lives — this month's guided audio for paid subscribers walks through exactly that: a short practice for locating which cities, rooms, and streets your body is still quietly carrying, and what it's like to let that be true without needing to resolve it.
The Cities We Carry is a short guided practice for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who:
Suspect their bodies still “know” more than one place at once;
Notice themselves changing channels into old walks, streets, or rooms mid‑day;
Want a gentle way to see what their nervous system is holding without having to do anything with it yet.
It won’t offer advice or next steps. It won’t try to make you feel better. It will stay with you, for just under eight minutes, while you notice what’s actually there before you move.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.
If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.