The Places That Almost Fit

On belonging everywhere and nowhere, and learning to live with a half-zipped suitcase.

A Home Without a Postcode

The Ancient Greeks had a word: οἶκος (oikos). The root of “ecology” and “economy,” but also:“home.” Not just a house, but the place where you belong.

Where your story begins. Where you return to. A space that breathes familiarity, shelter, and selfhood.

The poetry of a word that insists home is more than a postcode. And yet, I’m still searching for mine…

Born Wanting Elsewhere

From a young age, I knew I wanted to leave. Not out of rebellion, but curiosity.
I sensed there was something else: a different kind of light, a new air. A story I hadn't yet been written into.

I didn’t know where it would be. I just wanted to feel more myself.

I’ve spent the past few years slipping between cities: London, Paris, Bologna. The perfume changes, the light bends differently, the air speaks in new tongues.

But I keep wondering:

Does loving a place make it home?

Can beauty, or even fluency, fake belonging?

Love as Home💌

They often say “home is a person.”

The first time I fell in love, it felt like that.

Safe in a way that made me childlike. No explanations. No adjustments. Just belonging. I thought: This is it. The warmth. The stillness. The certainty.

But when it ended, I felt exiled from my own sense of stability. Like my inner child no longer had anywhere to curl up. And instead of searching for that feeling in another person, I began chasing it across postcodes.

Isn’t that what we do? Swap postcodes for healing. Try on cities like jumpers in autumn. Hoping a coastline might hold what a person once did.

Familiarity Without Belonging

The UK has always been the backdrop of my reality: My childhood bedroom. My GP. My boiling kettle. But I’ve never felt rooted here. It’s a place of motion, not meaning.

Cyprus, my second skin, feels closer. The language fits like a second mouth. The food is memory rich. I passed every level of Greek School.

And still, I’m not quite of it. Fluent, loyal, immersed, and yet somehow… just outside the frame.

Not a tourist. Not fully native either. Not unwelcome, but never entirely claimed.

Too British for Cyprus. Too Greek for the UK. Hovering between two places that both almost love me back.

University as a Version of Home

Then came university. A strange in-between that turned out to be its own kind of shelter.

Not the buildings or lecture halls. But the girl next door who knew how I liked my tea. Who recognised my silences. Who saw every version of me in a week, and never flinched.

That kind of seeing—that kind of safety—It was temporary. But it held me for as long as it could.

A Friend’s Truth

One night, in a voice note spiral, my best-friend said something that stayed with me:

“In some ways, it’s beautiful,” she said, “to have multiple places that feel like home. It means you’ve loved widely, you’ve lived deeply.”

Then she paused.

“But it’s also hard. Because you start to wonder where you truly belong. Is it where you grew up? Or the places that taught you how to be new?”

And she was right.

Maybe we all carry different definitions.

Maybe home isn’t just about place.

Maybe it’s recognition.

Being known; by a city, a person, or a version of yourself that only comes alive in a certain kind of light.

The Word I Didn’t Know I was Looking For

A few weeks ago, I came across a word that stayed with me: deslocado. Portuguese.

At first, I wasn’t sure what it meant. But with the help of a friend, and a bit of my own half-buried Latin, I pieced it together.

Des- is a negating prefix; lugar means “place.” So deslocado translates literally as “displaced,” or more precisely, “removed from place.”

Not lost. Just not quite located.

And that’s exactly how it feels, isn’t it? To live between places.

• You pick up habits from one city, leave a version of yourself in another.

• You fall in love with atmospheres, not apartments.

• You find pieces of yourself mirrored in strangers.

• The sunlight changes your face.

• The coffee changes your pace.

But nothing ever quite sticks long enough to feel like home.

Deslocado isn’t about being without a home. It’s the ache of having too many, and not fully belonging to any.

Maybe This Is the Truth…

Maybe we aren’t meant to belong to one oikos. Maybe we collect fragments instead:

A Sunday morning in Paris.
A thunderstorm in Bologna.
A Greek coffee in Cyprus.
The sound of your flatmate’s key turning in London.

Maybe home is a mosaic; Beautiful. Borrowed. Always slightly incomplete. Maybe that’s the most modern thing about it.

Closing the Door Softly

I don’t think I’ll ever define home fully.
But I know how it feels:

Like sunlight through curtains.
Like someone remembering how you take your coffee.
Like a city that changes you, and still lets you stay.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, home is just the place where you don’t have to explain why you left, or why you stayed so long. Maybe it’s just where you can arrive, exactly as you are.