Home Is Relative

There were five of us huddled in a booth of a 24-hour Tex-Mex in Sevilla, Spain, at four in the morning. Three of us were blonde; two of us could speak Spanish; all of us were reaching that point in the night where drooping eyes turn into ceaseless giggles and an unquenchable desire for nachos. We had promised each other that we wouldn’t eat any food in Spain that we could find at home, but our promises, just like our plans, had to be a little flexible.

When we first arrived to Barcelona for our dream semester abroad, we were plagued with helpful advice from veteran students, program advisors, and friendly Spaniards on the street. Hold your bag while you’re on the metro. Oncoming traffic will not wait that extra second for you to cross the road. Spanish waiters are always angry; don’t take it personally. And while all of that advice has served me valuable at some point in time, no one ever warned me that forgoing a hostel to save twenty euros and opting for Plan I’ll-Cross-That-Bridge-When-I-Come-To-It was a bad idea. But as many a pin on Pinterest has told me, the best stories come from bad ideas.

As we sat in Tex-Mex, sipping Coronas and shoveling guacamole onto toasty tortilla chips, I talked with four girls I had know for two months like I had known them for years. Travelling has a tendency to speed up relationships and erase boundaries, I’ve discovered. Not two weeks prior, we were hastily typing in credit card numbers as we planned our weekend escape to Morocco. The lure of the hot, African sun, lazy camel rides, and harem pants was enough of a drive to convince near strangers to climb aboard a ferry together and see what Tangier could offer. But while we sat there, thanking every deity we could think of for installing this specific restaurant and repetitively checking the only phone left with a charge for the time, so we didn’t miss our flight home, I realized we had been calling Barcelona home.

I’m not sure when it happened. Somewhere between the jet lag, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Pyrenees Mountains, my residence of only four months had earned equal status as the house I lived in for 20 years in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I had always tied ‘home’ to ‘family’, but now, it seemed, I needed to alter my definition. I spent my entire flight to O’Hare trying to solve this dilemma, but it wasn’t until I was sitting on my couch, missing those four girls, did I realize my definition of home was correct; it was my definition of family that needed revision.