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.