Learning to Feel at Home Again

Nobody tells you about the specific grief of leaving. Not the dramatic kind — not standing at the airport with tears on your cheeks — but the quiet, persistent ache that settles in months later, when the novelty wears off and reality begins.

I moved from Casablanca to Montreal two years ago for a graduate programme. The first winter almost broke me. Not because of the cold alone, but because of everything the cold represented: distance from my family, from my language, from the version of myself I had always known.

I called my mother every day. Sometimes twice. She would describe the weather in Casablanca — always warm, always familiar — and I would sit in my apartment wearing three layers and try to remember what that felt like.

The turning point came unexpectedly. I was at a grocery store, and I heard two men arguing in Darija — Moroccan Arabic — over which brand of olive oil to buy. I laughed out loud. They turned and stared at me, then laughed too. We ended up having tea at the café next door for two hours. They had both been in Montreal for over a decade. They showed me the city’s invisible map: the Moroccan butcher, the halal restaurant that tasted like home, the community group that met every Friday.

Homesickness, I have learned, doesn’t disappear. But it transforms. It becomes something you carry with you rather than something that carries you. It becomes part of who you are — the particular sensitivity it gives you to beauty, to language, to the small ways people try to find each other across distance.

Montreal is my home now. So is Casablanca. There is enough room for both.