Where Is 'Home' for an Expat?

Moving abroad from the familiarity of one's home country can be an exciting and terrifying experience at the same time. But what happens when you visit home after years of living abroad? Suddenly not feeling at home in your own country can take you by surprise. Where's your home now, expat?

Every migrant must have heard the classic, silently judgemental comment at some point of their foreign journey: "So... when will you stop this aimless wander and come back home?" It's a harmless wish expressed by someone who loves and misses you back in where everything is just like in the old days. Someone wants you back there so things could be like they used to - you could stroll around those same old streets, buy those good old local groceries and chit chat away in your native language. It's an invitation to that reassuring familiarity, suggesting that anything and everything you experienced since leaving your home country's soil was just a temporary displacement, like a journey made by Bilbo Baggings, and in the end you can always fly back home into the open arms of your welcoming native land. But does it really work like that?

If you were born and raised in a single country to parents with a single nationality, the case looks clear at first glance: you grew up in Finland to Finnish parents, what's the problem? Your home is in Finland. Stop acting like a special snowflake. However, this blog post is not written with the thought of contesting the idea of 'home country', despite the complexity of that very notion to those individuals who have migrated at very early age  - it's to contest the idea of 'home', and how our sense of home can shift as we ramble on around the world and plant seeds of ourselves in all its different soils.

The experience of migration inevitably involves the confrontation between 'home' and 'away' - to travel is to move, to estrange yourself from familiarity and inhabit an unfamiliar space. That unfamiliarity in a new space goes by the name 'culture shock': the habits we found comfortable, reassuring and deeply rooted in our spine are gone, and have been replaced by some sort of anomaly that only poorly replaces the things you hold dear. If you're from a northern nation like yours truly, entering a southern culture sphere with much less personal space and much more kisses on cheeks can be an absolute shock for someone like us who are used to silently staring at other people from a distance. The 'Away', the opposite of your home, is filled with these anomalies, unfamiliarities and wrong kind of bread. Everything back home was so comfortable.

But as time goes by, your survival instinct kicks in and you start inhabiting this unfamiliar space with more confidence. Kisses on cheeks? Bring it on, bro! Embrace me like the latino you are! A bottle of juice and a bag of crisps for lunch? Whatever you say Tesco, I'll take your meal deal, I'm too hungry to fight it. As the days, months and years pass by, these unfamiliarities turn into familiarities: your every morning starts with a bag of apple-cinnamon oatmeal and instant coffee, you surf the tube system eyes closed and speak the foreign language in your sleep. You're on track with everything going on in your host country, every local celebrity photographed drunk in a bar, every politician embarrassing themselves in public, every reform made to a healthcare policy.

Then you encounter that person. "When will you stop this aimless wander and come back home?" And as the plane lands and you enter that once familiar soil of your reassuringly familiar home country, you expect everything to have stayed exactly as they were since the day you left.

But it hasn't.

Why does rye bread make my tummy ache so bad? Why does Finnish coffee suddenly taste so bitter? What new transportation system? Wait, where did they put that new tramline? No sorry, I haven't really followed the news, don't know what's going on in the politics. Yeah.

The home your family talked about suddenly feels so alien. Why? What did you do wrong? This is your home country, you've missed salty liquorice since the day you left, and died to spend a day in the summery, sunny streets of Helsinki just like back in the days. Why does it feels so... not at all home?

Our understanding of 'home' comes from familiarity. What is familiar is what we feel comfortable with; we surround ourselves with things that make our everyday life run smoothly, simply. What is not often considered in the notion of migration, of estranging yourself from familiarity and your home country is that travelling doesn't only include a spatial dislocation, the act of leaving the familiar place, but a temporal dislocation. My Finland is the Finland of the past, the one I left three years ago: this 'past' is now associated with home that I can no longer return to, because it doesn't exist in the present. This is why 'home' is always a question of memory.

This 'home' we crave for becomes a mythic place of no return - the geographical location exists, Finland is always there if I wish to return to its familiar sounds and smells. But the time and place of the home country we knew has passed on, has morphed the way us emigrants have evolved and changed. The terrifying realisation of not knowing where you are while standing in the middle of that shopping centre you've spent time in since you were five years old - it was renovated while you were gone, and you're now completely at the mercy of your friend to lead you through corridors and shops you've never seen before. The corridors you knew are long since demolished.

What that person asking you to come home means with 'home' is that space you inhabited as the person you were years ago. But it ignores the pain of an emigrant who returns to this space and is put on the mercy of others' hospitality, of accommodating you on their sofas and futons, of letting you use their monthly bus card so you could stop spending your now foreign currency on single tickets. Home is not being on the mercy of public wi-fis as you no longer have a Finnish phone number.

You have become a visitor in your own home country.

The nostalgia of walking the streets once part of your everyday reality only carries you so far. Day by day you start missing your oatmeal-instant coffee breakfast (possibly because that once so familiar Finnish nutrition is now completely alien to your digestion system), your new vacuum cleaner you just bought back in Dublin, the smell of the Guinness factory roasting malt on weekends.

You wanted to return 'home' to your family and friends, to salty liquorice and sunny days in Helsinki, but those expectations you put into this experience inspired by your memories can't be dug up from your luggage you spread on your family home's floor. You're a stranger in your own Finnish skin, speaking your native language feels reassuring and alien at the same time. You accidentally answer to people in a wrong language and get judgemental looks from your friends as you try to explain you don't do it to seem special. It's just... what you're familiar with now.

Your family and friends were not there to see you change. They didn't sit on your back as you were lost in Montréal, they didn't hold your hand as you accidentally kissed someone on the lips while trying to go for the wrong cheek first. They weren't there as you shed your Finnish skin and started asking 'how are you?' from every person encountered, when you learned to chit chat about weather with the Irish. But the same way those people didn't see you change, you weren't there to see your home country change like they did.

The unexpected, unfamiliar space entering your bubble of familiarity in the form of a culture shock, requiring the shedding of your skin, an irritating itch (as put by Sarah Ahmed) moulds you little by little. Travelling is about the surprises in sensation: different smells, different sounds, different tastes and people. As time goes by, those surprises become more and more rare. The shedding. You've become a summary of all your lived experiences around the world and no longer fit into the old mould of that person you were when you first left.

This experience of leaving home and returning to an unfamiliar place is the failure of your memories to make sense of those changes: 'failure which is experienced in the discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, a body which feels out of place, which feels uncomfortable in this place', as put by Ahmed. You can no longer inhabit this once familiar space in the way you thought would be familiar.

My parents divorced when I was very young, and none of us stayed in that home, in that city, after it was all over and life went on. Despite my dreams occasionally still taking me back to that apartment in Espoo, nudging me towards a place my subconscious still believes is my home, it's a place of no return, a space which no longer exists. I believe this experience has affected my abilities to adapt to change, to the feeling of displacement and making myself feel easily at home in an unfamiliar space. 

Exactly the same way I identified my 'home' as the place where (as tacky as it sounds) my heart was as a child - by my family, not in a certain geographical location - I now as an adult identify my home by my Canadian partner, Alex. He's my anchor, the familiarity I will carry with me wherever I go - the mixture of French and English, of chocolate spread on my toast and of rising intonation when asking questions (something I really had to practice so he'd understand I'm asking a question!). The memories created with him are my present, and the memories I have of Finland I will always associate with my 'home country', but no longer with my 'home'.

Home is where your heart is, right?

(This post was inspired by Sarah Ahmed's wonderful article Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement, and Avtar Brah's book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities.)

 Where is your home? Have you felt like a tourist in your home country after moving abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP 101

Looking for advice on how to survive that monster, long-distance? Look no further, 'cause you're with a professional. 4 different partners, a total of 2 years of expensive phone calls and lonely nights. My current boyfriend of 3 years and I survived over a year of trans-Atlantic love. What works? What doesn't work? I swear by now I have seen it all.

Restless feet and hunger for adventures come with a cost. Sometimes, in the midst of all this rambling, we fall in love - and always with the wrong person, right? No, really. It's always the person who lives the furthest or is about to leave for Abu Dhabi in a month. But you're in love, and a few panicky and tearful nights later you've made the decision to try long-distance. Moments later you find yourself aggressively googling the cheapest flight tickets to the other side of the world. Congratulations. You have now officially entered the purgatory of your relationship.

I'm going to be honest here: not everyone can do it, and not every relationship can take it. My long-distance relationships have failed, but at times they have also had happy endings - I know both stories. I know how it feels to stare at someone's back disappear behind the security check point, knowing you will never see them again. But more than those painful goodbyes I have seen them appear from behind the sliding doors of the arrivals gate, smiling from ear to ear, knowing your patience paid off and you will never ever have to be apart again. (Or so you wish...)

This is why I wanted to divide my Long-Distance Relationship 101 into two parts: DOs and DON'Ts. Before we start, however, I want to point out a few extremely fundamentally absolutely necessary important points:

1. Long-Distance Relationship is not a normal relationship -  Stop treating it as such. I have heard countless of people tell me "I couldn't talk to my boyfriend every day even if we were in long-distance". Well, bad news: when you literally can't see each other for 4 months, suddenly those 30 minutes of casual chatting a day become more important than you think.
2. Long-Distance Relationship needs extra effort - Be ready to commit to that. It's not easy, it was never about to be, so give it the extra push it needs and take time to maintain your relationship. Every time I got asked "How are you guys doing it?" the answer was pretty much "Hard work and patience." It's work. It can get tiring and frustrating, but if you want to succeed, stay strong.
3. Long-Distance Relationship is still a relationship - Give it the dignity it deserves. I have been treated as single both by my friends and people interested in me because "he's away so you're practically single, right?" No. No. No. Being in a long-distance relationship might mean you can't fall asleep on each other's arms every night, but it should not resonate back to other people as me wanting to fall asleep on anyone else's arms in the meantime.

Now that these three things are clear and memorised, we're good to go!

Disclaimer: these are my personal observations based on my own experiences. Everybody works differently, and every couple is unique. Please don't throw rocks at me if something I said didn't work for you.

DO: KEEP IN FREQUENT CONTACT WITH A CONSISTENT SCHEDULE

As I mentioned above, long-distance relationship is not like a normal one. The rules of this game are different. As someone who's been to a few completely ordinary relationships myself I'm aware it's possible to stay together without putting much effort into daily texting sessions - and if something urgent comes up and your date night is cancelled, no big deal. There's always tomorrow. Especially with a decent time-zone issue you should always schedule your skype sessions in advance. Make them if not daily, at least frequent. It's surprisingly easy to drift apart when you have no idea what they've been up to lately, and your status in their everyday life fades. Alex and I skyped almost every day, and if it was absolutely impossible for me to stay up until 2am or for him to wake up at 6am to skype, we at least sent a ton of Facebook-messages. We sent each other a bunch of completely ordinary photos every day, just to maintain the feeling of sharing a life together.

DON'T: CHAT WHEN YOU BOTH HAPPEN TO BE ONLINE

I admit making this mistake in my failed long-distance relationships in the past: I just kind of expected us to end up on MSN Messenger (yes I'm that old) or skype at the same time, despite the 9-hour time difference, which resulted in us basically not talking, ever. Something else always came up and I didn't make it to my computer on time. Needless to say, I lost the connection and we broke up.

DO: HAVE A FORESEEABLE SHORT-TERM PLAN TO SEE EACH OTHER

It's not always possible to have flight tickets ready for the next time on the moment of parting, but it's a comforting thought to know approximately how long it will take for the next hug. I used to have a calendar where I'd cross out days for our next moments together, and there was surely something soothing in this habit. Visuals helped me cope with time passing so slow.

Long-distance relationships are relationships of uncertainty. When will we meet again? Can I afford flying to him two times in six months? Will this work out? This is why it's important to have something to look forward to as it makes the relationship feel more consistent. Being in a long-distance relationship without a plan for the future may feel like driving in a tunnel without seeing the light at the end, and in the long run the uncertainty of what's happening to you can get tiring.

(Personal touch: Alex and I once parted after Christmas, planning to meet up again in 6 weeks. Later on it turned out Alex couldn't afford flying back to Europe so soon, and our 6 weeks turned into 4,5 months. That sucked.)

DON'T: LEAVE THE RELATIONSHIP HANGING

It won't manage itself. It takes two to tango and to fall in love again every day from thousand miles apart. Long-distance relationships are all about practicality and rationality, as paradoxic as it may sound - I mean, talking about 'rationality' in the same sentence with 'let's live 5000 kilometres apart and see each other every 4 months while still staying vigorously in love' seems a little off for me too. But hear me out, it's all true. A machine this big needs someone with organisational skills to pull the levers. Plan your next meet-up. Stare at your calendar a lot. Don't expect your long-distance monster to magically figure itself out while you're busy having fun.

DO: TRUST EACH OTHER

This comes without saying. "Trust" is probably one of the most important words of any long-distance relationship. Don't get me wrong here: it's completely acceptable to be scared at times, since with time your affection or feeling of closeness might dry out and the temptation of physical comfort lures in. What helped me in the past was to ask myself the same question: Would I cheat on him/her? I figured my partner was probably having similar fears about me, and trying to put myself in his position made me feel more comfortable. But I guarantee you this whole long-distance thing of yours is gonna hit the rocks if you don't think your partner can stay faithful!

DON'T: DEMAND TO KNOW THEIR EVERY MOVE AND EXACT LOCATION

But please, please, please don't overdo this. Yes, he/she is far, you can't see them, you can't always even hear them. As pointed out in the first tip up there at the top, I prefer to keep in frequent contact throughout the day/week/month/year, but that doesn't mean you should be texting them every 20 minutes to ask what they're up to right at this frigging moment. As painful as it sounds, long-distance also needs space. Let your partner have their night out without feeling guilty for not sitting alone in the booth, texting you, while the rest of the gang is getting loose on the dance floor. That will only make your relationship feel like a burden. Or a buzzkill.

DO: LET THEM GO

Did you discuss your long-distance relationship with your partner before deciding to jump into it? Did they tell you about their plans to move abroad? Were you ok with all this? Good. In my experience the most important part of a long-distance relationship is to let your partner pursue their dreams, and for them to let you pursue yours. This is, above all, the reason why both of my successful long-distance relationships worked out in the end. My ex was about to do a 3-month internship in Russia when we met, and I gave him space to go and enjoy it, with the condition of seeing him every 2 or 3 weeks. That passed fast and later on we moved in together. However, 2 years later we hit a dead-end when he was about to leave for an exchange semester in Turkey, and I wouldn't let him. Long story short, he's out of the picture now.

He wants to do it. Don't stop him. I have been asked to drop everything I do or am to move on the other side of the world to be with someone. That didn't turn out well. You guys need to have your own lives, and stopping someone from pursuing their dreams for the sake of seeing each other every day will leave your partner forever linger with the question "what if I had done it?"

DON'T: GUILT TRIP ANYONE FOR THE SITUATION

You need to discuss where you're at in your relationship before any decisions about long-distance are made. Both of you need to be 100% ready for it. After you've shaken hands and accepted what's to come, you have officially lost your right to complain about the situation. "I wouldn't have to aaaalways stay up super late to skype with you if you hadn't decided to go volunteer in Colombia!" In normal, healthy circumstances this should be no one's fault. Compromises have to be made, both from your and their side, but making your partner feel like they're a pile of shite for deciding to take that job will not fix what's broken.

Last words: it may seem like the end of the world right now, but it's completely realistic to get used to living in a long-distance relationship. All you need is a routine, a handful of trust and a lot of faith. Hear from the veteran: After one year of long-distance relationship Alex and I managed to live in the same place for a year until we ended up in a situation where we would again have to be apart for two months. Neither one of us ever even considered these two months to be "long-distance relationship" as we were so accustomed to being apart in the past that such a short sprint was basically a joke!

Have you been in a long-distance relationship? What helped you through it? Share your tips in the comments below!

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WHEN FAR AWAY IS TOO FAR AWAY

There are times when living abroad feels like the best idea ever, and then there are times when you wish you never left. This is a story about the latter one.

Emigration is fun when things go as planned. Life goes on in your new country, and your entourage back home doesn't have much to report about - nothing negative, at least. It's easy to fall into this expat bubble where everything else outside of it kind of stops existing. My problems are in Dublin, my errands are in Dublin, my worries and duties are in Dublin. The thin linkage back to Finland only reminds of itself when I occasionally have a chance to skype or whatsapp my friends and family in Helsinki. When there's not much happening in Finland, I'm content, because I can be sure I'm not missing out on anything.

Living abroad gives you so many things: independence, confidence, experience. I have had the chance to see the most marvellous of things - the snowy mountains of Greenland piercing a carpet of clouds moments before I landed in Reykjavik, the people of the huron-wendat tribe perform a traditional Native American hunting dance during their 3-day dance festival. I have stared at the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean at the coast of Western Canada and admired the silhouette of skyscrapers of New York from the top of Empire State Building. But in the end none of that matters, because despite all of the different wonders of the world I have seen, all hospitals look the same.

And there is something so indescribably terrifying, something so excruciatingly painful in that moment when you follow a nurse pushing your loved one's hospital bed into the room where you know she will die.

A month and a half after receiving the news of my 71-year old grandmother's cancer diagnosis I find myself back in Finland, having booked the last possible flight still available with a week's notice. I have next to nothing in my bag: a tooth brush, a pyjama and a set of undies and socks (which of course looked slightly suspicious in the airport security check and probably was the reason I was pulled aside for a "random swabs test" for strains of chemicals in my luggage). I only brought myself, my stuttering Finnish I haven't had a chance to speak in 4 months, and my heavy guilt of ever having left my family.

She died 2 days after my arrival. The moment I heard about her death, 3 hours after visiting her in the hospital, I had this film-like rewind of all of those brief moments we had together during her last years - and they are few, as I spent her last Christmas in Canada, and I only saw her once between my return from Québec and move to Dublin. I found myself asking "what if": what if I had never left? What if I had spent the last 3 years in Finland with my family instead of travelling in god knows where? Would I have more memories with her? Would I have more to cling on to now that she's gone, when everything I have left of her are those few whatsapp messages she sent me to Dublin?

My last message to her says "Always." I stared at this word for quite some time afterwards, trying to realise there will never be anything after it.

Time is limited when you live abroad. Every moment spent away is one more moment for you to live the life you wanted, and one moment less to be close to your loved ones. Finding the balance is painful.

Have you lost someone while living abroad? How have you found the balance of living your own life and visiting your home country? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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As I was leaving you, Canada

6 days ago I boarded a plane away from my life in Québec. As the plane took off and I got my last glimpse of the city lights of Montréal in the dimming night, I knew I had turned my back for all that could have been: my temporary work permit could have been extended, turned into a permanent residence, and in the end, maybe one day, I would have held my Canadian passport in my own trembling hands after having cheerfully chanted the lyrics of O, Canada in front of a jury. In the very end, if I had chosen otherwise, I would have become a Canadian.

But I chose a different life. So as the lights of Montréal slowly faded away and disappeared behind a wall of clouds, I tried very hard to think forward, hold back the tears and remain grateful for all that I experienced as a resident of Canada, for I have inevitably been changed forever.

I never considered Canada - not before meeting Alexandre, that is. In my mind Canada was just a stereotyped and distant country on a continent I had never even visited, yet alone thought of one day calling my homeland. Lumberjacks, plaid shirts, maple syrup, ice hockey, polite people always saying sorry, all that jazz. But it wasn't for me, who had long since fallen in love with a whole different kind of culture. And as life worked in its mysterious ways and I one sunny summer day found myself standing in that very same P.-E. Trudeau airport for the first time, exhausted from the longest flight I had ever taken, I was a tabula rasa. A blank board, ready take in all that Canada would throw at my face, in good and bad. I had no expectations and no prejudices. My only experience of a Canadian person was the man, Alex, who waved at me from the residents' queue a few meters and border guards away, while I was stuck in the much longer and insanely slow visitors' line. Alex was about to introduce me to Canada, his Canada, and I was prepared for everything. That entrance hall on that airport in Montréal was, and always will be, my very first breath of a country that would, in the upcoming years, end up filling my lungs with its love, hate and completely unpredictable adventures.

I have said good bye five times on P.-E. Trudeau airport. Sometimes I've been the one leaving, other times I've stayed. But every time - every single damn time - Canada has shot its little harpoons at me, and every time those good byes get a little harder as Canada is pulling me back. The first time, 2 years ago, I cried because of Alex and the thought of not seeing him for 2 months was scaring the living crap out of me. 6 days ago everything was different. After 2 years of being shot with little Canadian harpoons time after time my feet, my heart and my stomach hungry for more poutine were so tied to this land, and I didn't cry only because of Alex - I cried because I was about to lose not only his Canada, the one he had showed me from that magic carpet of his (precisely a 2005 Toyota Echo), but my own.

In 2 years I had had time to observe, learn, experience and get attached to a Canada that would be special to me, and only me. My personal relationship with Canada had been formed and was no longer dependent on my dear Canadian ambassador, waving at me encouragingly from that queue back in the days. My Canada is no longer a distant stereotype of lumberjacks, plaid shirts, maple syrup, ice hockey and polite people always saying sorry. Well, yes. Actually. But there's something else now.

Poutine: french fries, cheese and gravy

My Canada speaks French. It greeted me with a cheerful Bonjour! and started whipping me to repeat it to an extent where I wanted to spit on its pretty little francophone face. My Canada is full of people of minority who love their language, their culture and their heritage so much it hurts, they squeeze it like a scared child is squeezing his toy on a nightly trip to a bathroom across the corridor. They laugh loud like Americans, pull off their plaid shirts and beards like the most stereotypical English Canadian lumberjacks, eat like the British and love like the French. They hug you tight and they give you their all, whether its kisses on the cheeks or food from a nearby vending machine when you're out of change. Les québécoises, they will love you like a tiger mother loves her cubs, as long as you try and roar at least remotely as loud as she can. That francophone folk, in all their infinite and furious passion and willpower to fight against oppression, are the most easily flammable material I've ever encountered. Vive le Québec libre! is the first sentence my Canadian ambassador ever taught me, on that damp but lovely little flat on Highfield Street in Leicester, and whether or not they all agree on these political views, they all have one. Even the ones who say they don't, as I pose the question, they all engage into an inner monologue about independence. My French-speaking Canadians love all this so much they occasionally forget there are other ones out there, ones like themselves, as minor and a bit lost.

My friend Will and his weird Guinness

Despite turning inwards, Québec is inhabited by the most loving, caring, friendly and polite people I've ever encountered - and I'm not kidding. The stereotypes are all true, and I love them for proving them all right. My Canada is about people who let me throw myself into their arms, knowing I would be safe and sound, and that whatever I say or do, they will love me for it. During the past years I have been impressed, astonished and utterly amazed by their habit of always finding ways to show me how much they can care. My Canada sounds like an annoyingly polite counter-question "... but what would YOU like?", reeks of weed at night on a street I can't remember, and feels like a gentle touch on my shoulder as I press my drunken head in shame against the bar desk after spilling my drink. And on that moment, as I, drunk as mentioned, encountered a barman who brought me a new drink for free instead of kicking me out like in Finland, I started crying. (Honestly, this happened and it's my friends' favourite running gag: "Mel I know I'm being really nice right now but please don't start crying") So many times Canadians have made me burst from happiness as I jump into their arms in the middle of the office or fall asleep on their couch during an insane nightly winter storm. They have made me laugh so much my abs hurt, and they've made me cry, they've made me angry and disappointed, and as I'm fighting with them on the phone at dawn after a party that turned weird, they always lower their heads, say they're sorry and make everything alright.

My Canada is full of people who are overly self-conscious, unreasonably insecure and sorry to an extent where I want to grab them from their plaid shirted shoulders and shake, shake, shake them into the realisation that their tiny little francophone culture has so much to offer and so much to teach to the world, that instead of throwing their flaming passion into strangers' face as a defense mechanism, they should OPEN, and share that crazy national dish of a poutine with the outside. My

Canada has the most breathtaking landscapes I have ever seen, the incredibly vast and empty wilderness, humbling mountain horizons and waters like nowhere else in the world. Its hiking trails have put me to my knees so many times I'm constantly bruised, but once I reach the top, every damn time I feel like screaming from the top of my lungs how incredibly grateful I am to stand right there, right at that moment, sharing a glimpse of this magnificent land, wanting to ask the rest of the world why you don't love Canada and Québec like I do. Canada is a country of people who don't know what they're sitting on - their shared smiles in a bus or sun-glazed mountain tops in a distant horizon from the window in the morning commute are the kind of moments they pass with a shrug, but I cherish forever.

My Canada, my dearest Canada, the one I saw last as mere dimming city lights from an airplane window: you are a land of internal struggles and conflicts, things you want to forget and things you have promised never to forget, as stated on all of Québec's license plates. But you're also a land of people with so much potential, so much love to share, so much unleashed energy and so much furious fire I've seen in all those eyes I've stared at on street corners, in the dark of the night, on door steps, across the table. You have changed me. The girl in that entrance hall, scared of the unknown, no longer exists. I breath you in and I will never let you go. Whatever emotions are loaded into all those license plates I've seen during the past 2 years, I now know what Québec's motto means to me.

Je me souviens. Lest we forget.