I moved to this country at twenty-three. That was sixteen years ago. I speak the language without an accent now. I've spent more of my adult life here than there. When I visit home, which is less often than I plan, my cousins call me by a nickname that means the one who left.

I don't belong here, fully. I don't belong there, fully. This is not a complaint - it is a structural condition of the choice I made, and there are compensations. But I want to describe the specific texture of the in-between, because I don't think people who haven't done this understand that it's not loneliness. It's something more like being translated. Something is always slightly off. The register is never quite right.

What I miss about home is not the country as it is. The country as it is has changed. What I miss is the country as it was when I was young - a place that no longer exists anywhere, that I cannot return to even when I go back. The thing I miss is a time, not a place, and the confusion of those two things is what makes the grief so difficult to locate.

I've become someone who cannot be fully held by any single place. This is what movement costs. Not rootlessness - I have roots in multiple soils - but a permanent slight displacement from every context. The man who moved does not fit the country he left. The man who arrived does not fit the country where he landed. In between is the self.

Where is home? Is it the place you left, or the place you are? What if the answer is neither?