What’s it Like to Go Back?
Reflections of a Third-Culture-Kid

I am a gypsy.  I am a nomad.  I carry my home in the suitcase of my heart.

Moscow.
Tunis.
Rabat.
Washington, D.C.
Cairo.
Paris.
 
Listing these cities is a habit as natural as stating how old I am or what my name is.  Like beads on a necklace, each experience is separate.  Strung together, unified, they compose who I am.

“Welcome aboard flight 607.”

What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, is that once I move away…I must continue forward, without turning back.  The places I leave don’t wait for me the way my parents do, staying up until one, two, three o’ clock in the morning to holler, “Where have you been?!”

The plane lurches into motion.  My stomach lurches with emotion.

There are some places you can always go back to.  For me, that place is Washington D.C., where the school librarian still remembers that my favorite book in the 3rd grade was My Father’s Dragon, and that I was the only one who had already read two complete volumes of Shel Silverstein poems at the age of nine.

“We hope to make this a pleasant and restful flight. Refreshments will be served shortly.”

Going back can sometimes feel as if I’d never left—but it’s tricky; usually I can feel the space of time.  Going back to Cairo for spring break after living one year in Paris felt like the closest thing I can associate with going back home.  “Home” is a funny word for kids who grew up as I did.  We tend to give long, complicated answers to the question: Where are you from?  Yet, upon arriving in Cairo, I found no stale crumbs, no unopened letters, no dusty picture frames…only “Welcome Back” balloons.  Salah, our former driver—and my stand-in father during Papa’s year-long service in Baghdad—picks me up at the airport and asks about my mother.  Most taxi drivers in Paris only talk about the weather.

“We will be landing in approximately four hours and twenty minutes.  Enjoy your flight.”

There are some places I can always go back to.  Other places must remain as wax figures behind glass in a museum, untouched, perfect and immutable.  I am not speaking of cities, necessarily; but, rather, of a stone bench, or a sunny rooftop, or a moss-covered fountain.  These little places I cannot return to because someone else is busy not realizing they are there, backdrops once a part of a bigger scene, unnoticed until they are all that is left on the stage.  I have learned to avoid being a stranger in a past I am no longer a part of.  I have learned to not endanger the memory of what I can no longer touch.  I smile and nod from a distance.  They remember, and so do I.  Keep it that way.

On my last night in Egypt before returning to Paris, I camped in the White Desert with my (fifth) best friend.  Picture in your mind, blue-yellow-red-green Bedouin tents, baladi bread baking in a mud brick oven, a wrinkled brown hand dancing and thumping a camel-skin drum.

Our legs are sore from riding donkeys.  Our cheeks hurt from laughing, and my hands ache from holding on so tightly to the sand I am lying on.  Above is a sky I have seen before, but have never seen before.  The distant-dark-dependable blue hangs sober still above the hot, blowing sand; and the stars are not stars but July 4th sparklers, glistening-glittering-glowing sparkles, dripping down and tickling my face, and I am laughing.

I am laughing. I am thinking.

I am thinking about how people grow and places change, and it’s beautiful, and the world is like a giant ant farm:  nothing stands still, not even the earth.  I am scurrying through the ant race like a toddler scrambling to a freshly-baked cookie, and I do stop to smell the flowers.  I do think back, but I only move forward.

When the stewardess approaches and asks me the essential question, I reply without hesitation: “I’ll have the chicken, please.”

Do you want to know my Golden Rule for choosing airplane meals?  Think of rock-paper-scissors. Always beef over fish, and always chicken over beef … but if they ever offer lamb, take it.  Just don’t hesitate to change your mind, because everything else changes, too.

This inconsistency doesn’t make me weak; it helps me to grow.  Nothing stays intact, and when enough belongings break or get lost in the moves, I remember.  I remember that I carry my homes in the suitcase of my heart because when the wind blows and the sand shifts, only there, in my suitcase, do they remain safe.  The past is in the past, and that is where it must be.  Bring on the new.