Rise to find the sun

Dear future hubster,

May the odds be ever in our favour. May the year be generous and kind and forgiving, and may it help us getting closer to everything we want. May what we want overlap with what we need. May our love keep shining, may it be appreciated, amplified, and returned. May we receive plenty and pay it forward. May we keep dancing when the lights go out. May we hope defiantly; may our love shelter us from our fears.

May it be better; may we make it so.

That (lovin') feelin'

 Dear future hubster, 

you know as much as anybody who's ever met me and paid attention that I spend a loooot of time searching for meaning. Almost as much time as I spend wondering what and where home is, and how I can make it where I am. Oh and also trying to resist the feeling of home when it starts approaching, because complicating my own life should be an Olympic sport. 

And I know when it starts approaching, I recognise the signs, and I welcome them every time. Whether it's going to a concert venue three times in as many months, returning to the Christmas concert at the Danish church for the second time (doing anything annual for the second time really), being invited to a random theatre show because people know I'd be around,  knowing a backup cocktail bar when the first we go to is closed, seeing a familiar face coming out of the metro because I see them on my Saturday morning runs in the park, knowing people at the office party, knowing people at the book club, knowing people, being known... that's how it begins. 

And right now that's all I know. It has begun, and that's a good thing. 

What was I made for?

 Dear future hubster,

you don't need me to tell you that a lot of awful things are happening in the world, more so nowadays than what I think I remember, and you also don't need me to tell you that it's difficult for a girl like me not only because I want the wolrd to be a lovely cozy wonderful place for everybody,  but also because I don't know what to do to make it so. (Now come think of it, statements starting with "you don't need me" don't make it any better either.)

So when we're lightyears away from when WTF was an appropriate and accurate response to the things happening, when a girl like me, one who lives and thrives on reading and writing, one who would not ever shut up, doesn't know what to say because the words have no meaning or the meaning they have doesn't reflect the reality we're experiencing, the nagging voices asking what I'm doing here and what for and what the point is are getting all the louder, and the "what am I good for" doesn't feel like a question I should or could ask somebody else.

The somebody elses do come around though, and whoever is in charge of my visitors' schedules has a particular sense of humour because they always tend to show up at the same time, so after weeks of just me and the nagging voices there's suddenly representatives of the Luxembourg crew, the family crew, the Juba crew, the New York crew, and the Goma making their appearances all within two weeks, and they do make me oh so happy because they are unassuming and no-nonsense and they ask the good questions and say the funny things and cry about the important things and also laugh about them and there's cheese and sleepy faces and suitcases on the floor and somewhere within the busy uneventfulness of an impromptu work-from-my-home gettogether I have a revelation.

That maybe my purpose is simply that somebody can take a nap on my couch, should they need it. 

There she goes again

 Dear future hubster, 

earlier this summer people kept asking me where I'm going for holidays, and depending on the level of small talk-ness of the interaction, I responded in more or less detail that I don't really have a lot of leave days because it's my first year in Belgium etc etc.

But then I started thinking and had to admit that even if I had the days, I wouldn't know what to do or where to go. In the past ten years since I left my home by the (Petrusse) river, my summer holidays consisted of The European Tour: a few weeks of couchsurfing between my friends and family, living out of a suitcase that infamously exploded in many living rooms, dropping keys in mailboxes as lousy part-time lovers, forgetting personal items of a great variety, as if wanting to leave proof that I was there. 

So when I finally acknowledged that it would not do any good to anybody if I didn't I took a week and did what I do best: got on a bunch of trains and covered a thousand kilometers or two, invited myself to family holidays and family homes; due to some plant-aunt duties I even managed to drop a key in a mailbox. And of course I forgot a few personal items here and there. 

What I also did was feeling both a sense of comfort, a familiarity, an odd freedom, gratefulness that I get to do this, and an unexpected almost-revelation. That of course I do a European Tour, this is who I am, showing up in the life of the people I love when I can.

I also learnt a few things (what good is a trip if it doesn't come with lessons?). I learnt that the European tour does get easier in the sense that it doesn't involve jet lag or overseas travel, and 1000+ km can be covered by public transport, (something I love and will never not praise). And that the European tour does not get easier in the sense that I get waves of sadness washing over me every time I leave a place and a group of people, and that I don't want to go back to doing responsible things.

And then when I did go back to doing responsible things, I learnt that there's beauty in that too. In the the back to school mood,  in the office suddenly filling up again with people old and new, and in the joy of seeing them again, the comfort of the familiar. 

Something I tend to fight, something that tends to happen anyway and then I tend to be grateful for it.

Our house

Dear future hubster, you know that I don't need much inspiration for some self-help wisdom;that I love a good anniversary, that I am a firm believer and a frequent promoter of the "without [insert experience] I wouldn't be here" notion. 

So it should be no surprise that this week I've been thinking and talking about The Big Move I made ten years ago this time. When I exchanged Lower Bonnevoie to Tshukudu roundabout, although didn't exchange polka dot heels to combat boots as some people expected. When I left a place I loved and where till present day I want to go home to, took a deep breath and a leap of faith and landed in a place I ended up loving and for which I till present day feel waves of homesickness for. 

You might say, dear future hubster, "but love you get attached to every other place and pretty much every group of people you encounter" and you wouldn't be wrong and it's also kind of the point I'm trying to make? That every leap and even every little baby step I've ever taken has in fact changed my life because duuuh that's how decisions work, and just because mine are sometimes more dramatic than whatever obscure "average" there is, doesn't meant that I'm any different - everybody's life is changing. And for somebody who always yearns for stability, I ironically and beautifully keep finding it in the aftermath of big leaps. It's like breaking myself into pieces so I can make room for new pieces and put a bigger shinier improved picture back together. The cracks sure hurt for a while (some for ever, let's be real), but look how beautiful the new version is too! 

Why am I telling you this? As a heads-up I guess, so that you know that I come with a DNA family, an Animal Party family, a 36-os szoba family, a Lost Volunteers family, a 17th Floor family, a rooftop sunset family - those are all my people and my people are everywhere. 

And now more than ever I wish they weren't so much everywhere but more where I am (and ok I haven't exactly made it easy for anybody to know where I am, much less even to know where I'm going to be), in that literal or figurative Fat Expat House. I want, and I dare to say we all need, to feel the warmth of a community around me, I want to build a polycule big enough to start a revolution, all the while wishing we didn't need a revolution and I could just make the world a better place one garlic cheese bread at the time, but here we are. In the kitchen, with the volcano glowing on the horizon.

There were moments of gold

Dear future hubster, there are moments of grace about living in Brussels. The commonplace ones when it's almost the longest day in the year and you're walking home after a dinner where the small humans of the household know you as Kata from Congo and you're walking because you missed the bus but also because it's one of those mild nights that are not exactly warm - it's still Belgium quandmeme - but it's not cold and for the first time in months you actually guessed the weather right and it's almost 11 and it's not completely dark yet and you can see the light towards the West so the opposite of where Gandalf is to be expected from and for a brief moment it makes you forget about the riot police you saw earlier and that you just foster girlfriended yet another lost boy to yet another safe harbour and you feel whatever the Greeks had among their 7 different words of love for the love of life itself and let's be real the Greeks knew what the deal was, they can claim half of polyamory and most of the illusion of democracy - that kind of grace.

In all your damaged glory

 Dear future hubster, 

In this life I have that I might have chosen or that might have chosen me, it's easy to just get in the groove of things and just do do do (as opposed to [here comes the sun] dudududu). And while it's actually kinda often kinda hard to get into the groove of adulting when it's not exciting but rather daunting or just plain boring or involves having to interact with products and services that fail to deliver on the one function they were designed for, it is even harder to let go of the pressure to at least pretend having my shit together at presenting some semblance of order. Worrying about keeping my apartment tidy and my hair neat and my syntax correct and my clothes only moderately quirky because what if I suddenly have to impress somebody or justify taking up space. 

And yes yes I know that those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind and all that jazz but first of all it's not always true and then even when it is, it's easy to forget. 

But then! Then come the people who don't only shrug it off and genuinely don't care about the façade but who actually are here for the mess. Because unmatching earrings are fun, because when I say "we don't do perfect around here" they feel relieved that then they don't have to do it either, because they think that messy hair is healthy and jumbled up syntax is less important than meaning, and with all that quiet, adventurous acceptance they actually say "girl, who you are will always peak through any semblance of order" and then I remember that I always have clean cups to drink coffee from and there's always room and time to air out the happy and the sad and always for the hugs,  and the way the tension leaves my body when they remind me that I can just be me and that's not just "okay" but it is a deliberate, powerful stance... if that's not love, I don't know what is. 

But it is. Love, that is.