The story of the snail

Since I've been a little kid I had a great fondness for snails. In Romania, we had this nonsensical song that we would sing to make them come out of their shell. To this day, I still don’t get why we were telling the poor things to go drink murky water from the Danube River as part of the song. But I’m drifting. The reason I liked them so much was that we were told that snails went through life carrying their house on their backs wherever they went, so they never had to miss anything.

Years later, I find myself feeling a bit like the snails of my childhood. Being torn between the East and the West, with my fondest memories as a child and teenager in Romania and the raging twenties spent abroad, I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that “home” has become a state of mind rather than a particular place. It had become the Skype conversations with my friends and family rather than my old room, a trip through the mountains and a day spent by the lake rather than my high school, college or master’s – it has become something that I carry with me at all times rather than something I have to travel towards.

Whether this is good or bad, I cannot say yet. I always thought it’s good to have roots, not only wings. I’ve felt sorry for the people who are too international and who stay silent when you ask them what they consider home. I like that I get furious if some uneducated moronic A-hole insults my country, but I also like the fact that I am not entirely shaped by the place I come from.  I am Romanian but I’d like to think that there are other things that define me more than my nationality.

In reality I’m a bit less optimistic than this. I leave Romania with a little bit of heartbreak every time, but I know my life is not here anymore, at least not entirely. But now, with less than 24 hours before heading back to the cold, noisy, diverse, fast and arguably fun Brussels, I wish for the same thing I always do before I depart: that time would pass just a bit slower for the little snail who carries his house on his back.