Back to what?

Someone asked me again last week. “So. Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

Back???

“Back to England! Back home!” As though I've been away on an unusually long errand, the milk's gone off, and everyone's standing in the hallway waiting for me.

I left England at 19. I've now lived here in Japan longer than I ever lived there in England. I’m 50, do the arithmetic. The country I'm meant to return to is one I last actually inhabited as a girl who had just learned to drive, had never held a bowl of miso, and in a time when I dreamed in only one language.

So when someone asks when I'm going back, I always want to ask, very sincerely, back to what? Back to where? Back to who?

I don't, usually. It comes out sounding pissy. But I mean it as a real question. Back to a house I don't own, in a town I haven't lived in since the last century, near people who love me? As if nobody here does. Back to a version of myself I'd have to reconstruct from photographs? Back to a sort of feral girl? I could do it. I can drink my builders brew tea here just the same way. It would just be a very elaborate piece of theatre, where I would jump through many hoops and I'd be the only one who noticed the theatrics of it all.

Here's the thing the question always assumes: That home is a place you're from. A fixed coordinate. Issued at birth, non transferable, waiting patiently for you to come to your senses and return to it.

I believed that too for quite some time. I carried a low, background sense that Japan was where I lived and England was where I was from, and that these were different in some load bearing way, that one of them was real and the other was a temporary arrangement.

What changed wasn't a decision. It was a long practice. Somewhere in the middle of a yoga teacher training, lying on the floor of my studio in the dark doing yoga nidra for the hundredth time, I felt my whole body agree to be exactly where it was. Just, well…… settled. Landed. Home, in the only sense of the word my nervous system has ever actually recognised.

And I realised home had never been a postcode. It was settling. The moment the body stops bracing and admits it has arrived. I'd had it in Setagaya a thousand times and never called it by its name because I was too busy believing home was four thousand miles away, being kept warm for me like a dinner.

This is the part I can't quite explain to others without sounding snippish. Home isn't an address. It's the arrival of self and embodying it. And I carry the capacity for home around in my own body, which means, an inconvenient truth is presented for the question and those who ask it. Home… I carry it with me. It's in Japan. It was in England, when I was small. It's on the mat. It'll be wherever I put my body down and let it land.

There's a line I've been living inside of for a while now, and those of you who have joined my yoga nidra classes will recognise “within me is a home I never leave”.

So, no. I'm not going back, because I never left. You simply can't go back to a home you never actually left, and you can't return to one you're already standing in.

They keep asking when I'm going home.

I've stopped trying to explain that I've been home the entire time. I say “this is my home!” They think I mean Japan. But my home is just not on the map they're using.