What is Home?

Scandinavia to Scotland isn’t the wildest journey ever travelled, but when I arrived in Edinburgh from Denmark, I couldn’t have felt further from home. Until I reconsidered what ‘home’ actually means.

Words by Tobias Nørgaard

Knowing the number of steps on the staircase down to the local Lidl. Recognising the faces of the couple living in the window across the courtyard. Sliding the credit card out of my black leather wallet before tapping it on the bus as if I had never done anything else. Finally, I’d think, closing my eyes after collapsing into bed. Finally, I’m home. But what is home?

Edinburgh has been my official residence for the last few months. Home is where my mail is delivered. But home means something different. It’s not an address line, it’s a feeling. An invisible, unfathomable force screening you from the dangers and insecurities of the chaos outside the walls. So how did I suddenly shape that word in my mouth without travelling 10,608km to Denmark?

Two months ago, I pushed a 21kg suitcase in front of me down Dalry Road from Haymarket. I was optimistic, I was curious. I imagined going out the same night for beers with my new flatmates, the first of many good memories to come. My phone gave me directions. Just a couple of hundred meters left. Do people make a home?

My entire life in Denmark was woven into my old street-level apartment in Aarhus. It was hanging on the wall, in the form of polaroid photographs of Julie, my girlfriend. It was on my bookshelves where my friends’ favourite reads lay. It was standing in the corner in the shape of my electric piano and guitar, synonymous with my upbringing on

the family farm, where my little sisters would harmonise songs of Adele in perfectly separated triads. Does family make a home? “Here’s your key”, a girl said, handing me a black plastic chip, clipped onto a red hanger. I rolled my suitcase into the lift, pressed my key against the digital lock, and walked in. A long, white painted hall with eight doors and yellow light falling from the ceiling. I held my breath. Once I entered my narrow, IKEA-furnished room, I sat down on the An invisible, bed with thoughts and feelings spinning faster and unfathomable faster inside of me. Empty shelves, empty drawers, force screening empty hangers. It even smelled empty. Hospitalyou from the room clean. If bacteria can’t live there, people can’t dangers and either. home? Does comfort make a Three days prior, I’d insecurities found myself sitting in my best friend’s garden, on a of the chaos perfect late August evening with filled wine glasses. It outside the was one of those evenings where you grow into each walls. other, become closer than ever before. As the sun set, I had to go back to my apartment, pack my clothes in the black suitcase. If we didn’t embed ourselves into our environment, our belongings would have no meaning other than their entirely practical value. Do possessions make a home? The first few days, I felt terribly foreign to every single part of Edinburgh. Everything repelled me. It wasn’t right, or maybe I was wrong. But then I fell asleep, and then I woke up, and it felt a little better. Then I repeated it, repeated it, repeated it, and suddenly – one day – I woke up without remembering what that first day was like. Through a constant exchange between my surroundings and my feelings, I’d become a part of this place, and this place had become a part of me.

A home.

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