Frankfurt Nostalgie
A Diary Entry
I think a lot about the word and the idea of home. Especially when traveling.
What it means, where it is.
Growing up moving every three years, there are many places that feel like home. And sometimes no where feels like home. That sounds a little sad, but I don’t mean it to be.
It’s just that to not grow up in one place, or one house, can make ones home less obvious. This idea of a home becomes something a little more complicated. Something to figure out. Many even venture for.
What is a home anyways?
We all know a home is not one thing. It is family and it is a house, yes. But the possibilities are endless really. It is somewhere warm, somewhere with dinner, though very sadly not for all. It is good friends, it is feeling loved. Feeling comfortable and heard. It is a place where you can be yourself, or maybe not yourself at all. The place where you begin and end your days. The place where all your things live.
Sometimes I feel as if I am searching for a home. As if I will stumble across this place or person, a town, a community, and suddenly feel utterly at home. And then…I will stay there forever?
Is a home something to be found or made, or both? Is a home finding peace within, happiness with ourselves and who we are?
I search for a home and yet feel like I could live almost anywhere. Maybe a place becomes a home and therefore a home is created not simply found. Is living somewhere synonymous with being at home somewhere?
Could you happily make a home anywhere?
It has felt very comfortable, maybe even home-like being back in Frankfurt.
A place I have so many memories, and really important ones at that. Ones as a little girl and a teenager. I lived in Frankfurt for a total of six years, but in two increments of three years. The first time my family moved here I was just staring school, and the second I was entering high school.
Here I have memories of walking to a favorite wooden playground in Grüneberg park. Bundled up and trailing far behind my mother to investigate fallen concords, it was autumn. This park smells exactly the same as I walk through it now, damp and earthy. Not at all a unique smell for a park, but smell is a particularly nostalgic sense.
I can remember sitting in a very jealous huff on our windowsill. From there I could see my sister Eliza riding her new razor scooter up and down the sidewalk, her birthday present. To date, one of my most visceral experiences of jealousy.
I can remember a Christmas when Eliza and I got Game Boy Colors. She got a lime green one paired with Donkey Kong Country. Mine was purple (but not the transparent one) and paired with Mario World. We sat on opposite ends of the couch and played for hours. I later found out it was our biggest sister Emily who suggested our parents get us game boys.
I remember my sister Emily had a poster of the Backstreet Boys on her wall, Eliza had a yellow light that clipped onto her bed, probably from Ikea. We three played a made up game called Laughing Hyena. One day Eliza and I taped Emily’s underwear to her bedroom window. Sometimes my friends and I stole Emily’s teenie bopper training bras and put oranges in them.
Today I walked by the apartment where all these memories happened, and I felt close to them. As if they were stored up there on the third floor of apartment building seven. I wonder about the family living there now. Do they put their Christmas tree in the same spot? Do they also have hamsters? I hope they are happy.
We moved to Thailand and South Korea before retuning to Frankfurt. This time living just a few buildings over from apartment seven, I was fourteen, entering high school, and alone with my parents since both my sisters were in college.
These years hold juicier memories. Taking the Uban (the train) back home after a Friday night out, tipsy from too much Strongbow. Graduating from cider to mojitos and tequila shots, from tipsy to drunk. House parties and sleep overs. International baccalaureate, if you know you know. Staying up all night writing papers, staying up all night chatting to one boy on facebook messenger. Then during one winter holiday no longer chatting on messenger, but in the corner of Starbucks over lates. Falling into teenage love.
Today I walked by the apartment building where I was a teenager. Where sometimes I yelled “stop going in my room!” and wore Uggs. Where I bought the same hair straightener as my favorite youtuber, so sure it was the solution to all my insecurities, and used it once.
I’m not really sure where I am going with this.
These memories are all long, long gone. They are of previous versions of myself, shed and left somewhere back in time. We first moved to Germany 20 years ago and secondly 9 years ago. Yet, being back here in the place where they were made refreshes these memories of mine. Here, in the place of there genesis, they become tangible once again.
They become tangible once again.
I can walk through the same park or visit the old bars where my friends and I spent many a weekend evening. And that feeling of familiarity, well it feels a little like home. Just like if you did grow up in one house, in one place. I imagine you open the door to your childhood bedroom and step back in time. Trying to reckon with the teenage you.
As someone who had a somewhat nomadic upbringing, it is really special to visit one of my many homes. That is just it really, for me, home is not one thing.
Home always sounds so singular. But in a lifetime we all have many homes. Some that maybe feel better than others, perhaps due to the people we share them with or the their placement in a neighborhood or the world. This is so obvious, and yet I feel very happy to have been reminded of this today.
