I’m in a non-descript hotel in Amsterdam, a place I called my home for 8 months. Now I stay in hotels here.
There’s something terribly disturbing about traveling to 4 different cities in the same week especially when you’ve lived significant amounts of time in some and no time at all in others. You brush by the old memories as you create new ones. Memory full as the new McCartney song goes.
I just finished Biographie de la faim from my favorite french author Amélie Nothomb. She writes about her experiences of having moved quite often as a child, something I lived myself, oscillating between Paris, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Canada, and the identity crisis that can accompany these journeys. In particular this quote struck me:
“C’est peut-etre cela, etre de quelque part: ne pas voir de quoi il s’agit.”
It’s almost impossible to translate but it goes something like this: “Maybe that’s what being from a place means: not getting it”.