where to call home

notes on belonging

I have lived in Amman for two non-consecutive years of my life, one year to study and one year to work. I still visit to see my boyfriend. Whenever I go back, the first night I am there, the morning call to prayer wakes me up. I sleep through it on all subsequent nights, but the first night, without fail, I will always wake up to it.

⋆★☆✦✧✧✦☆★⋆

By fifteen years old, I had lived in six different houses in England. This arrangement did not suit me; to this day, the most upsetting part of my parents’ divorce at four years old was leaving the house that I loved so much. I never really felt home in any of the houses I lived in next. Every time I tried to construct a peaceful bedroom I could retreat to, a space with a consistent sense of comfort, another traumatic family incident would occur, and any kind of respite I had created would be violated. I didn’t feel safe anywhere I lived.

Thanks to my parents’ custody agreement, I used to have to go to a different house four times a week. The urge to keep being on the move, on the run, has stayed with me. I look through the windows of the houses in every new city I go to and think I should make a life there, as if leaving a place behind could mean the same as leaving the past behind. But why did it feel so hard to do that? And why did I equate happiness with bravery?

All of my teenage years I dreamed of the day I could pack up and leave. I couldn’t see past that day: it was the ultimate end point. The one single answer to my happiness. Salvation itself.

When the time came, at seventeen years old, for me to choose my degree subject and my university, I felt like I had been handed a wondrous gift, a get-out-of-jail-free card. I could pick somewhere really far away from home. I could pick something requiring a year abroad in a foreign country that would propel me even further away from home. I knew I was destined to be a long distance daughter, that I could love my family better from afar. And so that’s exactly what I did.

I decided to study in Edinburgh, six hours away from both parents’ houses, majoring in Arabic and French, to guarantee me time in both a French-speaking country and an Arabic-speaking one. It was the therapist I saw in my final year of university who suggested that I had done this deliberately. Strangely, that was the first time this had really occurred to me – I liked to think of myself as more in control of my decisions than to have let my parents influence my choice of studies and thus future career so deeply. But while it wasn’t conscious at the time of my choosing, I definitely agree with that observation now.

Although I thought I was solving all my problems, Edinburgh presented a difficult start for me. Due to my heinous crime of not being from London, I really struggled to fit in. The only close friend I made that first year was a fellow outcast, Katrina, from Aberdeen. As we began to settle down, March 2020 saw the outbreak of COVID19 and we spent until our third year locked down at home, then locked down in a privately rented flat – as the government pretended we would return to on-campus classes – keeping the economy afloat with all the other duped uni students.

Thankfully, in September 2021, I was able to move to Amman, Jordan, for my year abroad to study Arabic. I arrived at 4am to the flat my friend and I had secured via WhatsApp a few weeks prior and immediately unpacked into the silent night. I put all my clothes in the wardrobe, my jewellery on the bedside table, and my laptop and books on the desk. I even stuck my photos and postcards to the walls. Finally, when I was done, I closed my eyes, lay on my back, and listened to the morning call to prayer for the very first time. Unfamiliar but more comforting than anything I had known previously, it sent me into a deep and gentle sleep. I woke up to a brand new world.

Amman’s scenery was so unlike what I was used to, I felt as though I was walking around a video game for those first few days. I lived on the third floor of a flat building, and being situated atop one of Amman’s seven hills, this gave me the perfect vantage point for a wide-reaching view of the city. Of the densely packed, yellow, flat-roofed houses, the dry, grassless patches of land, the huge, gorgeous murals painted onto the side of every tenth building, the men smoking outside their shops from dusk til dawn, the gas cylinder sellers blasting Für Elise, and the constant honking from cars driving so close together I could sense my mother’s heart attack just witnessing them. Throughout the day, the sky subtly turned different shades of blue, continuing after the sun set, when the hues augmented until they reached a deep blue velvet. I had never seen time so accurately reflected in the sky before, the shades of golden hour, sunset and twilight each implausibly distinct. It made me feel like I didn’t need to be in control all the time, because the sky had got it, the sky would always be there, painting the same colours each day. Standing on my flat’s balcony, watching the scenery and the sky, it felt like the city was mine. And I think Amman knew that, knew that it could belong to anybody, and it welcomed us all.

Every time I had thought, is this all there is?, the life I was remaking that year told me there was in fact more. Perhaps today is all there is. Perhaps our time is limited. But the way we manipulate it, the way we mould it like clay and knead it like dough, doesn’t have to be. Those days in Amman were filled with friends in small kitchens, some cooking, some sitting on counters, talking. They featured late nights where sleep came second to conversations that can only happen when the evening air is warm and thick and pregnant with curiosity. They were bursting at the seams with embarrassing encounters and exhausted laughter and dancing and playing table tennis on rooftops. And at the end of challenging days, hope and happiness never left. They crashed on the sofa, ready to help clean up tomorrow.

I remember a night where I was walking back from a bar with my flatmate, trying not to be too conspicuously drunk. But as I turned a corner and saw the moon, I gasped, drawing attention to the two of us, out late alone and clearly inebriated. I couldn’t help it. I had never seen the moon hang that low in the sky, so close to us it was brushing the horizon, almost dipping below it. When I looked at it, so close to me and the city, I felt like my dreams, too, were closer to me. Like I finally lived somewhere that I could reach out and touch them, if I only leant forwards and opened up my palms.

In that small bedroom where I stored less than 1/8 of my belongings, I never slept better, and I never felt lighter. The city wasn’t built for me, didn’t understand my accent or my broken, Fusha Arabic, but it was where I first truly felt home. It was where I learned how to take home with me. How to nurture the home inside. It’s where I felt safe enough to fall in love for the first time, and was forced to be changed, and to have the courage to leave a piece of my heart behind.

Loneliness is a bright blue dress with an open back. That’s the way of it, isn’t it? One day you’re sitting alone at the bakery and the next, you’re standing across from the ocean and the next, you’re crying at the movies and after that, you’re planting fruit trees and learning street names and bringing in the mail and kissing someone’s delicate face. You suddenly realize you’ve slung together something called a life. The word home drops out of your mouth like a ripe summer pear plopping in the backyard. Sticky at the edges. Heavy with sweetness.

Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West

Amman’s claim on me was too powerful. I returned after graduating university in 2023. Despite working in a horribly stressful environment as a teacher, I loved my extra year living there. The pace of life is slower and sweeter; people are friendlier and more open. It gave me exactly what I needed, both years I lived there: to stop being so closed off, and to let people in. And after helping me to work out who I am, truly, when I’m just me and I’m not the echoes of my upbringing, it let me be myself.

Before I travelled to Amman this June to visit my boyfriend, I had spent a couple of weeks worried that my resting heartbeat was too quick. I was feeling physical pain in my chest, and of course, whenever I focused on my heartbeat, it would rise rapidly, and so I wouldn’t know whether it actually was too quick or not. A chronically unsporty person, I have no Apple Watch or Garmin or Oura ring to tell me – and I frankly think it would only feed more of my anxieties to own one. As soon as I landed, though, I forgot all about my heart rate. That familiar sense of calm settled in my chest. I was back home. I was back in the place where time is a suggestion, and rushing is akin to masochism; where insanely intricately, uniquely and eccentrically decorated cafés are the norm; and where there will be a constant flow of traffic, even at 3am. I was back in the city with the low hanging moon.

Amman has multiple moons. Amman has multiple skies. Amman has housed multiple versions of myself – and it’s made me feel like all of them are okay.

I think that’s what it means when I return to the city, and the morning call to prayer wakes me on my first night. I think it means acceptance. I think it means that some things are always there. Some things will never change. Some things are constant. And some things will, literally, call you back.