Own land strawberry, other land blueberry

In the beginning of June, I was sitting on a bus headed to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art and was unexpectedly hit by a minor emotional crisis. As I watched the beautiful sea view that surrounds the well-off island  of Lauttasaari, I felt a sudden, deep sense of rootlessness, as if I had no place in this whole wide world that I could truly call home. And as Dorothy Gale put it, there's no place like home. I found myself thinking, "what now?" The passengers on that bus were regular people that you see walking in the streets of Helsinki any time of the year: exchange students, white collar workers, mothers with their babies. Hearing my mother tongue spoken by strangers all around me felt almost shocking; even if the words were familiar, they were not spoken to me. I had nothing to do with the other passengers, there was no merry moment of reunion, no affectionate words uttered, no embraces or shaking hands with long-lost neighbours. In fact, no matter how well I could understand the nuances of the language or identify myself with the unfashionable way ordinary people dress, or even discover their hair to be the exact same shade of ash blonde as mine, I did not know anyone, in the whole city of Helsinki.

Another moment of disconnectedness happened on a train between Helsinki and Riihimäki. The voice reading the operative announcements on the train had been changed, for the first time in my lifetime as far as I know. Hearing the new, deep male voice instead of the robot-like female voice whose robotic lines I was expecting somehow made me just a tiny bit upset. I remember thinking 'how did I miss this when I read the national news every day?’. Every time an expatriate returns to their homeland, it is inevitable that things will have changed, and certainly no-one will have asked what they thought about it. You notice different kind of advertising, price changes, new sub-genres of trendy people, and all of it, almost mockingly, emphasises the fact that while life goes on in that corner of the world, we are not there. It’s a lonely place to be.

The feeling of not belonging anywhere was brought out by the event of, once again, returning to my country of origin, for the summer break from Uni. This was of course coinciding with my 23rd birthday, and five years have now passed after I first became an émigré. Five years is a short time and the honeymoon might not be over yet. As for me, the acuteness of the crisis has since passed with a little love from the nearest and dearest. However, the questions remain. What, and who, do you become after years and years of living far away from home? Will you grow roots someplace else, and can you still keep the white and blue Finnish side to your character, timid and down-to-earth? In 30 years, will I still feel most at peace sitting by one of the thousand lakes?

Iso-Löytäne, photographed by Tiit Kööbi.