Random thoughts about home

Can you see the stars from your place?

I just noticed I can see the starts from my terrace in Den Haag. Not many compared to back home... 

You’re probably wondering which home?

I guess many, there are many memories and moments when I look up at the stars and I feel truly home, wherever I am.

It’s a home that is present with you at all times, we just sometimes forget to look up and notice, and remember.

There are many moments when I remember to look up, almost always on my own. But it always drags me back to the same memory, not of a day or a week, but a heap of instances all combined into my past, my youth, my childhood.

Back home, in Portugal, we used to have a house on the hill, where I grew up.

Surrounded by nature, the hills and mountains were our playground.

Sometimes, on chilly summer nights, we would take our sleeping bags and blankets outside on the terrace. Laying them all in a row so we could cuddle and stay warm, we’d lie and stare at the stars for hours. Thinking, talking, sharing. Sharing these experiences, life stories passed down from parents; realisations, appreciations.

I look back feeling so grateful for having these moments as a part of who I am. I’m glad I took the time to look up at the stars often when I was younger. To shut out all the rest, just for a little while.

It’s rare, I think, to find people to shut out the rest with; shutting everything out while staying connected.

With my family, it comes naturally. I love them. They’re my home, my everything. Each and every one of them is a part of me and who I’ve become.

Yet somehow, we also have separate lives, independent of each other. Each knowing things and remembering things that the others may not.

Do they remember those evenings as well as I do? Do they value those evenings as much as I do? Did it make them who they are, as much as it did for me?

Despite this, these moments can be shared with anyone that you truly let in, that you truly love. Someone who can be with you whenever you feel you want to shut the whole world out, but not be alone in that. Someone who can join you, who you can focus on and who can focus on you. Everything else just falls into the background, and nothing else matters in those moments.

That is true love, compressed into a simple breath, a simple sigh, a simple thought. Gone as fast as it arrived, through the winds of the chilly summer nights in Portugal, on top of the hill, staring up at the stars with my family...

I hope you find someone to shut out the rest with. And that you remember to take the time to pause and look up.

I hope I will. Because I know every time I look up at the starts, I’ll know I feel truly home.

Written by Sofia Tartaglia at 1:07am on the 8th of June 2021. Den Haag, The Netherlands.