Querencia
It was around month into my Europe tour when I met a handsome young Spaniard while I was on the train to Montserrat in Barcelona. When he asked for my name, he told me that it reminded him a beautiful Spanish word, Querencia. He said it had two meanings: first, it was where the bull would take his stand inside bullring and second, it is where your strength came from, a home wherein you are most yourself. Etymologically, it was also very beautiful. According to the Oxford Dicionary, in Spanish it literally means “home ground” from querer “desire or love” and in Latin, quaerere ‘seek’. Home. Love. Seek.
I carried his words with me when I was climbing up the mountain. What was home to me? What did I desire when I set out on this trip? What was I searching for? The long, quiet walk with myself, though initially uncomfortable became relaxing. There was no rush to find the answers. There was no anxiety that the person I am conversing with would be waiting for me to articulate what I still haven’t come into terms with in my own head.
During those moments, I wondered if I had really known what “home” really was. There were always times I had been uncomfortable with who I was, how I looked, where I studied or partied in. There were always periods of not being authentic with myself, giving in to peer pressure, the demands of society, or the expectations of my family.
Even in relationships, there have always been periods of distance between myself and the people I found most important to me. Sometimes, they closed in and the ties reinforced themselves, other times the distance becomes so great it seems cutting ties would be the most appropriate thing to do. And then I got to the top of the mountain, and one look down changed everything.
I caught my heart racing, standing in awe of what could only be the work of something or someone greater than myself. I remember feeling breathless, overwhelmed and slightly off-balance. I climbed the edge and hung my feet thousands of feet into the air, breathing in the greatness of nature and the feeling that my entire life had led to that one, perfect moment.
If I were to describe what I thought forever felt like, it would have been how I felt at that moment. Perhaps, it was only at that moment of complete isolation from what I once believed as “home”, the place where I had spent most of my life, did I really understand that no single place or person seemed to be the venue for where I continually felt my most authentic self. I realized that home isn’t a place or person, it was a moment, a fragment of a time that stopped the search for love.
Home is when and where our hearts feel at peace with who we are and where we are at that exact moment. Home is the moments we live for, what gets us through our bad days and where we get our strength from during periods of regret.
And when I came back to the Philippines, I began to see a little bit of home everywhere. I saw it in my dog’s eyes the first time we saw each other. I smelled it when my dad’s coffee finished brewing in the morning. I felt it when my boyfriend held my hand again for the first time, or when I saw all of the postcards from the places I visited when I was away. I remember it in pictures, seeing the field of Tulips in the Netherlands, dancing in a club in Luxembourg, going to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Being a traveller had made me realize that my Querencia went wherever I went, as long as I remembered, as long as I tried to find it no matter how fleeting it might have been. Home was wherever in the world the little bits of my heart was in that I kept close to me.
