Why We Need to Leave Home to Remember It

Thinking of home fills me with things that once were and things that will never be again.

I encounter the nostalgia that lurks behind all memories, the shadowy nostalgia that sometimes welcomes us with a smile and other times inspires a wistful sorrow. When I think of this place today—home—I see a wildly different picture than what I once saw. I see a snapshot of love and youth and those lost woebegone days that have seeped into the sunset of eternity.

Home is where we build our first memories. It’s the furthest distance we can look back to. It reminds us how far we have come and how we have changed.

I remember family and friends and home-cooked meals, giddy dogs with their tongues out and neighbors that baked cookies. There were cul-de-sac signs that read, “children at play,” and a school down the road peopled with the classmates that watched me grow up. I think of the Cheerios in plastic bowls, child-size baseball cleats caked with mud, and piles of Lego’s screaming for my attention.

In the background of my memories, dishes clink gently under hot, running water and smoke evaporates and puffs above the rice cooker.

I can still taste the cold smoothies of summertime. I feel the bruising sting of water balloons filled with icy retribution. The pointy blades of grass that made me itch and the ecstasy of presents on Christmas morning remain palpable so many years later. There was always a pervading mellowness; a charming milieu. Warm California sunshine reached in through every window like a caressing hand.

Memories of home are extinct yet relevant like artifacts in a museum. They are pieces of history that tell us where we are from and predict where we will go. These chapters of old remain suspended in our musings, preserved as a starting point to our story.

Home is not a structure of bricks and plaster and window panes; it’s not just a house or bedroom. It is most certainly a place, though not one with definitive boundaries. It is without a latitude and longitude. It is an era, an atmosphere detailed with scents and emotions and people.

Home occupies a time and place where “coming-of-age” happened everyday. Boyhood and girlhood and puberty were not just words we read about in books or heard in movies. They described our waking life, whether we knew it or not.

Life is hard to see when it’s right in front of you. Only once a river has emptied into the ocean can we see the rocks that glisten below. There was a time when our biggest worries included monsters under the bed and how to convince our parents to stop kissing us in front of our friends.

How luxurious those worries now seem to me, writing this at 22 years old and sitting 7,000 miles away from where I grew up. Home—that insignificant sliver of a corner of the globe—was once my entire world, as it once was for everyone.

Growing up, my world as I knew it was limited to schools and playgrounds and “coming home before it gets dark.” At the time, this was all I needed; it was all I knew. I knew home as where I slept and bathed and could have a meal, but that was about it. There wasn’t anything I wanted to question, I had nowhere else to be and nowhere else I wanted to go. I lived my life in my world—I was home.

Only when I left, initially for university and then to Hong Kong, was I able to recognize my home as home. Retrospect is imbued with wisdom. When “waking life” and “home” were synonymous, I was burdened neither by crippling nostalgia nor the sadness of missing people. Only upon leaving was I able to fully appreciate where and how I grew up.

Innocence fails to recognize both its shortcomings and blessings. We shouldn’t expect it to. We stay in the Garden of Eden as long as possible until the moment comes when we are removed, either by choice or force.

Thinking of home after the fact can give us something to learn from and cherish, a blueprint of our inception and footing for our future. Home is best appreciated when we can no longer call it home, when we can no longer reside in the protective shell of youth.

Aging is what gives us the wisdom to look back; youth is what protects us from looking too far forward.

Leaving home is what makes it home—we have somewhere to go back to to quench our nostalgia, to distinguish between what once was and what is now, a memory to keep us warm on a cold night and safe through uncharted waters. Leaving helps us highlight the things we miss, appreciate, and desire to reproduce elsewhere.

To remember home, we must first leave.