Home Is the Place That Never Changes, Except You Do

The first time I came back home after moving abroad, I was met with a wall of observations I hadn’t asked for. “You’re different.” They said it like it was a fact, like it was the first thing anyone could see about me. At first, I brushed it off, but the words sat in the back of my mind, turning over and over. Was I different? And if I was, how could they see it before I even felt it?

It wasn’t the kind of change you notice in yourself. Living in France for those first few months, I wasn’t keeping score. I was just trying to make it through—figuring out how to speak, how to belong, how to be. But coming back to Italy after that first stretch away? It was like walking into a time capsule that hadn’t updated itself to match me. Everything was exactly as I’d left it—familiar streets, the smell of coffee spilling out of the same bars, the rhythm of the language I grew up in—but I wasn’t the same. And no one could stop pointing it out.

“You’ve picked up an accent.”

“Why do you pause before you speak?”

“You walk differently.”

It felt like I was being dissected in real time, piece by piece, until I barely recognized myself in their observations. The strangest part was that I hadn’t noticed any of it until I came back. These weren’t deliberate changes. I hadn’t set out to become different. It had just happened—quietly, imperceptibly—until I stood in a place that didn’t know how to meet the person I was now.

That’s the thing about going back to a place that remembers you. It doesn’t ask for proof of your growth. It holds onto you as you were, and it’s jarring to see yourself through the lens of a past you’ve outgrown. I didn’t hate it—I loved coming home—but it came with this quiet pressure, this unspoken need to prove I hadn’t drifted too far. To show that I still belonged to the version of me they thought they knew.

But every time I step off the plane, I feel the distance growing. It’s not just the months I’ve spent in France; it’s the way I’ve stretched to fit into a life they can’t see. I feel it in the way they talk to me, the way they watch me, as if they’re searching for pieces of the old me hidden beneath the surface. And the truth is, they’re not wrong to look. She’s still there, but she’s layered with so much else now, so much I don’t even have the words to explain.

Home has a strange way of holding a mirror up to you. You don’t notice who you’ve become until you’re standing in the place that shaped you. It’s not the same as nostalgia, though it’s close. It’s more of a reckoning. This is who you were; this is who you are. And every time I come back, I feel that shift again—the push and pull between the comfort of familiarity and the discomfort of realizing I’ll never fit here the way I once did.

The comments haven’t stopped, even now, years later. “You’re so French now.” They say it with a mix of affection and curiosity, but it lands differently every time. Sometimes it feels like pride—like they’re proud I’ve made a life somewhere else. But other times, it feels like distance. Like they’re reminding me of the gap between us, even if they don’t mean to. And the truth is, I feel that gap too. I always do.

What’s hardest to explain is that I don’t feel fully at home in France either. I’ve built a life there, yes, but it doesn’t hold the same weight as Italy does. France is where I’ve learned who I am, but Italy is where I learned what it means to belong. And now I exist in the in-between, straddling two worlds that don’t fully claim me. In France, I’m the Italian who carries her history with her, and in Italy, I’m the stranger who left and came back slightly altered, slightly unknown.

And maybe that’s just what happens when you leave. You grow in directions you didn’t expect, and the people you love see it before you do. It’s a kind of evolution you can’t avoid. Every plane ride, every trip home, every conversation is a reminder that you can’t stand still anymore, even if you want to. You’ve left pieces of yourself behind, but they don’t fit the way they used to. And no matter how much you want to explain that, there aren’t enough words to bridge the gap.

Home doesn’t change. That’s the cruelest part. It’s stubborn and constant, the same streets, the same people, the same smells. And you? You walk through it carrying layers of yourself that no one else has seen. They see only the outlines, the ways you’ve stretched and shifted, but they don’t see the reasons why. And how could they? They weren’t there. They didn’t watch you stumble through those first months in another country, didn’t hear the silence that hung in every mispronounced word or feel the ache of missing something you couldn’t name.

Every time I come back, I feel like I’m writing a new version of myself into a story that’s already been written. And every time, I realize the story will never be complete. It’s not meant to be. Coming home isn’t about finding where you belong—it’s about seeing where you’ve been and knowing there’s no going back. Only forward.