As a long-term expat or immigrant living abroad, you don’t think about “there” much anymore.
Then someone mentions the city. Or a song comes on. Or the light changes in a specific way in late October — and suddenly your “there” arrives here.
It’s not quite a memory. It’s more like… a soft presence.
The leaving is what gets talked about for long-term expats. The arrival, the adjustment, the slow work of belonging somewhere new.
But the way a place you left continues to occupy you — that gets less airtime.
Not every home is a place you’ve just passed through.
There are the streets that shaped something. Where you became a version of yourself you’re still partly carrying. Where something solidified. Quietly. Seeping into your bones and into your way of moving through the world.
Those places don’t release you cleanly.
In fact, sometimes, they never let you go.
There’s no loss to name. You chose to leave. That place — your “there” — still exists. You could return — and some people do, and find that returning is its own kind of grief, which is a different story altogether.
Because when you return…
The version of the place you lived in doesn’t quite exist anymore. The version of you who lived “there” doesn’t quite exist anymore. The intersection of both — that place, that you, at that time — that’s gone.
You can’t go back to it. You can only carry it.
5, 10, 15 years later: your “there” is still within you.