Volver

Every summer I go home and file bugs against myself

Every summer I fly back to Spain and perform the same small miracle: I become fluent again.

I never stopped being fluent in Spanish. Fluent in everything else. The timing of dinner. The volume of a normal conversation. The correct number of kisses. The knowledge that when someone says ahora they mean sometime before nightfall, probably. For eleven months of the year I run all of this through a translation layer. Then I land, and the layer switches off, and for about forty-eight hours the relief is physical. Nobody here asks me to repeat myself. My jokes land at native latency.

This is the part of the expat return that everyone writes about, so I’ll keep it short: yes, it feels like taking off shoes that were half a size too small. You didn’t even know they were too small. That’s the trick of living abroad, the discomfort is so constant it stops registering as discomfort and starts registering as personality.

The part people write about less is day three.

Day three is when I catch myself getting annoyed at things I grew up inside of. The bureaucratic phone call that requires three transfers and ends with “you have to come in person.” The dinner that starts at ten and the opinions about my life that arrive unrequested. The noise — my God, the noise. I used to be this noise. Now some Nordic firmware I didn’t consent to installing flags it as a violation.

The annoyance isn’t really at Spain. It’s at the discovery that I’ve changed without signing off on the change. Somewhere between Copenhaguen and Cork, a committee I was never invited to rewrote parts of my defaults. I only find out which parts when I come home and they throw errors.

The verb gives it away

Volver doesn’t actually mean “to return.” Or rather, it does, but that’s not what the verb is doing underneath. Volver comes from the Latin volvere — to turn, to roll, to revolve. It’s the same root as revolver and vuelta. The English “return” pretends you can go back along the same line you left on. The Spanish verb is more honest: you come back turned. Rotated some number of degrees. Same coordinates, different orientation.

Gardel’s tango insists that twenty years is nothing. Twenty years is not nothing. Neither is eleven. The tango is beautiful precisely because it’s wrong.

So every summer vuelvo and I am slightly rotated, and Spain has rotated too, new slang I have to reverse-engineer from context, prices I gasp at like a tourist, a political conversation whose reference points I’ve half lost. We are two systems that keep drifting apart between syncs, and once a year we attempt to merge, and there are always conflicts, and some of them can’t be resolved automatically.

Where are we supposed to belong?

The standard answers to this question are all cope, and I’ve tried them all.

“You belong in both places.” No. Belonging isn’t additive. In Ireland I’m the Spanish one; in Spain I’m the one who left. Both labels are affectionate and both are a door held politely ajar rather than open.

“You belong nowhere, and that’s freedom.” This one is popular with people who’ve been abroad for two years and still find it romantic. Ask again at year ten, in February.

“Home is a feeling, not a place.” Home is very much a place. That’s the whole problem. If it were only a feeling, I could carry it through customs.

The answer, I think, is that “belonging” is not a location property at all. It’s a compatibility question, and compatibility degrades. Every year abroad, you patch yourself against a different environment. Every patch makes you run better there and slightly worse here. There’s no version of you that runs natively on both systems anymore. There hasn’t been for years. The summer visit is just the annual test that confirms it.

This sounds bleak and I don’t experience it as bleak. What I’ve stopped doing is treating the incompatibility as a bug to fix, as if with enough visits, enough effort, enough authentic reconnection with my roots, I could reconcile the branches. I can’t. The fork happened the day I left. Everything since is divergent history.