Never native

Heimat is the place you are supposed to long for, something that comes with marrow. I never felt it and for a long time I thought the fault was mine.

The culture I was born into offered its traditions the way you might offer a coat that was never cut for you. And, perhaps for others it was. It repelled me early enough that I never stepped toward it. I watched from the outside something I was supposedly native to but never once felt. Underneath it all, drinking as though something was needed to fill the space between the performance and any actual meaning. That is not culture but repetition looking for a pulse. There is a difference between culture that lives in people and culture that is kept alive by people. One needs no tending. The other needs a calendar and a costume.

I did not question myself about any of this. I questioned the others. What it was they were holding onto, whether they felt it or simply moved through it because the movement was familiar.

What I carried forward were not the warm things. A directness that does not soften before it speaks. And there is something almost wry in that: The sharpest tool I own for describing my distance from this place is the tool it supplied me with. The culture lives inside my critique. I did not choose that. But I know it when I see it looking back at me.

The distance was loud once. Deliberate. A person shedding markers the way you shed clothes that never fit. It grew quieter with age but it did not disappear. Some refusals calcified into habit. I know that about myself. Not everything I push against still deserves the pushing. The original instinct tho. That I would not perform belonging I did not feel. That one I do not regret.

I found resonance early. Never in what was handed down. Always in what I walked toward myself.

There are cultures that carry their age the way old trees carry theirs. Without announcement. Without effort. The depth present and not instructed. Hospitality not as manners but as instinct. Nothing is performed because nothing needs to be. Presence is the point. Space is made. Time is given. Nothing is required in return. I felt it most clearly once. It arrived in a single sentence said without hesitation by someone who meant every word. The way the body recognizes warmth it has been without so long it had forgotten to miss it. I did not experience it as discovery. I experienced it as confirmation. As the world finally matching something I had carried without knowing I was carrying it.

That is what leaving gives me. Not escape from anything, but clarity about everything. You go out into the world and you do not find something foreign. You find yourself, finally legible, held up against a different light.

I would not have known had I never left. The familiar asks nothing of you. It does not require you to feel anything you are not already feeling. That comfort is its own kind of blindness.

Heimat was handed to me. I handed it back.
What replaced it, I found elsewhere.