Geographies of Desire

I was six years old when I boarded my first transatlantic flight, weeks before my first day school. Somewhere over the ocean, I watched Titanic on a shared screen in the aisle, unaware of how warped my sense of home would become. We were moving from a small suburban town in Long Island to Hamburg, my parents embarking on a complex long-distance relationship that would ultimately dissolve. At school, I struggled with my German, and I was bullied for a while. It was the first time I felt that a place could shape your identity, and that belonging was something I would have to work for.

Subsequent relocations – six in total – each held the promise of resolution. Determined to move back to New York after high school, I wanted to live up to my ambitions. Berlin, where I landed in my twenties, allowed for creative expression and seemingly endless fun. Nearly a decade later, London held the promise of long-term commitment. l assumed that the right geographic coordinates might dissolve my restlessness. But migration is no antidote to existential uncertainty. The self remains unmoored, regardless of latitude.

Berlin felt natural to me in ways that other places didn’t. A city of transients, its social fabric is woven from Zugezogene – those who arrive from elsewhere. My linguistic duality allowed be to exist in a liminal space: I could be a chameleon, my German fluency and unplaceable American accent letting me blend in or stand out as I chose. In the early 2010‘s, gentrification had begun its slow creep, but remnants of a more permissive city lingered. A Späti [convenience store] beer cost 50 cents, and the dream of affordable housing remained feasible. Those around me oscillated between futures: today Berlin, tomorrow Barcelona, or maybe Lisbon? I, too, succumbed to this pattern of imagining the grass was greener elsewhere.

Is the grass always greener elsewhere?

During the pandemic, I sublet a flat in Athens, dialing into video calls with locked-down Berlin while the sun poured through my window. Artists I met in Athens at the time shared that, much like Berlin, their city was becoming increasingly transient, with rising property values and an influx of foreign investors.

I had sought temporary refuge in a place that, for others, was becoming increasingly unlivable. In some ways, my movement mirrored the very cycles I was witnessing in Berlin: pursuing creative freedom while contributing to the forces that made it harder for others to stay. By late 2022, London had become my next mirage. I told everyone I moved for my career. In truth, I moved for love. I convinced myself that London could be our shared home, a space to build something lasting. But instead of grounding me, it hollowed me out.
My savings drained away.
My visa restricted my work.
Movement, once my source of agency, became an exhausting question of permanence. I longed for the comfort of a community l had built over a decade in Berlin, one I didn’t fully recognize I had until l left.

After two odd years of bouncing back and forth between here and London, trying to stabilize my life and become more rooted amid career shifts and personal upheaval, l am still grappling with my relationship with home. In truth, my Fernweh, or my discomfort with being rooted in one particular place, could be boiled down to a desire to keep all options open. To never fully commit. In this way, Berlin makes sense for me, too. Desire operates as an internal map, shaping our interactions with place. Cities can function as projections of our needs. I am far from the only one grappling with the question of home.

Cities as a projection of our needs

One of my best friends, who grew up as a first-generation Taiwanese-American, makes a yearly pilgrimage back to Taiwan after growing up in different places across the US to reclaim her relationship with her ancestral homeland. For many migrants, movement isn’t voluntary.
Between 2022 and 2023, Berlin’s population grew by over 27,000, in part driven by an influx of Ukrainian refugees. Berlin also houses the biggest population of Palestinians in Europe, many of whom cannot return to their homeland, their sense of place defined by exclusion rather than choice. As Edward Said wrote: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”If longing is intrinsic to the human experience, then perhaps home is not a fixed destination, but the space between where we stand and where we imagine we should be. Step by step, I am learning to let go of the fantasies I attach to places and instead cultivating a sense of home within myself.