Berkley Center

The French don't have a word for "home." La maison, house. Chez nous, at ours. But there isn't really a word that encompasses everything that home does for English speakers. Home is a place where you live, where you return to at the end of the day, where you escape whatever reality you face in the week, be it work or school. In that sense, home is a little place, your house, your room, your bed. It's also big, it's the city you live in, the country you call your own.

But that isn't everything home is.

Home is where you are happy, you're content, you're safe. That feeling you get when you crawl under the covers on a cold day. Or when you're sitting in your backyard, the sun bright and toasty on your face. Or most importantly, when you're surrounded by friends and family who remind you that you don't need to be anything more than yourself.

Home is abstract; it's simultaneously in multiple places and people, that magnetic pull, that swelling in your heart that makes you feel fuller when you’re there and emptier when you’re not. And I've been calling Strasbourg and my little apartment with my French family my home for nine months now.

I think about all the places I've travelled while I was abroad, the cities I've seen, the places I've called home—the hostel, Strasbourg, Georgetown, my house in Connecticut. And all the people who've become such a part of my life that when I leave them, I'll have trouble going back to the places I once called home.

I came to France thinking that I'd come here and integrate, become French. I would be fluent, pick up French mannerisms, only have French friends, and if it weren't for things like Facebook, have almost completely forgotten what it was like to live in the United States and only speak English. It made perfect sense at the time; I was going abroad for a year of my life. And in study abroad time, that may as well be a lifetime.

Anyone who's been abroad can tell you a similar story, with more or less success than I've found. The places we go to on our study abroad years are already formulated, rich without our presence. It's hard to break that barrier and cross over into a culture that isn't our own. You are only there for a year or six months, and will be a tiny speck in the grand history of the city you're merely visiting.

And for that reason I know I'm lucky and grateful to have been a part of a world here that both never told me to change, accepting me for the awkward and disastrous American I was, and taught me so much about what it is to be French, European, an expatriate, that as much as I've felt a part of this culture, it's become a part of me as well.

And so, whether or not I'll go back to the United States with a French accent, I know I'll have reverse culture shock. In an email to my aunt in Washington, DC, I told her about how much I will miss the life I've made for myself here. She's also lived abroad, in Brussels for two years, and responded, saying, "I think it will be terribly hard for you to come back home—but you will ultimately acclimate. For me, it was more difficult coming back into the United States than it was going to Europe. I think it was because I tried so hard (and succeeded) there to take on and be a part of the new cultures that I felt a loss coming back (except of course to be with my family and friends)."

A word the French do have that doesn't exist in English is dépaysement. The closest we have is "homesickness," but dépaysement literally means, "not having a country." I've been living in France for a year, and my best friends are from everywhere from France to Australia. I've never felt more and less American than I do now.

When I look back on this year, I'll remember home to be moments that were so real, so special, that I'll relive them for the rest of my life. When I cried in my closet and my friend played guitar outside the door for two hours until I came out. When my friend and I were sitting on a bus for a week-long hiking trip in Sweden and I realized that even though I remembered to bring a star-gazing map, I didn't pack underwear or socks. When I showed up to a Super Bowl party and found out upon entering that I was the only girl and only American. When I went on a bike ride in the rain to Germany with friends and got back so late I couldn’t change for a birthday party and had to go soaking wet. Making wedding invitations, hiking for ten hours a day, switching outfits with friends in bathroom stalls, ten Thanksgiving dinners. All-nighters, singing in the shower, getting your car towed, sleeping in airports, not fitting into your old clothes, and that friend you always ask for advice, even when you know they can’t help. Those terribly awkward, could-have-been-uncomfortable moments that were somehow all magically okay. Because these are my people, and this is where I belong.

And while I do feel a little like I can't fully associate myself to any one country, I certainly don't feel like I don't have a home. Home is here, with the people I've shared secrets and memories with, that I'll never forget, whether I'll stay in touch with them for the rest of my life, or only know them in the experiences we've already shared. And the interesting thing about "here" is that it moves with you; I'll have this wholesome feeling in Washington, DC too, just as I have it now. Here and now and home: that's where I want to be, want to return to, and never leave.

So now, it's coming to the end, and I don't know how I'll be able to say goodbye to Strasbourg. But just like the saying goes, it's not goodbye. It's au revoir—see you again.