Maps change, passports are renewed; But that feeling of "not belonging anywhere" that settles inside a person searches for a new homeland in the shelter of words.
When I feel this pain most deeply, I always think of W.G. Sebald's melancholy walkers arrive. Those silent characters who carry the weight of the past and lost geographies in their hearts like a suitcase... Or Stefan Zweig's elegant, fragile longing for that intellectual Europe to which he can never return, among the ruins of "Yesterday's World". Literature whispers to us that this rootlessness is not a curse, but actually one of the ways people understand the world. Just like that universal feeling of homesickness that aches in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia; The longing for the past, childhood or belonging gradually turns into an invisible bridge that connects us to all humanity.
When geography disappoints us, when our home falls apart, or when we simply realize that we no longer fit in that home, language becomes our only home. Writers who suffer from the pain of rootlessness use words like bricks to build new rooms for themselves, and in fact for us, that are not exposed to wind. That's why I always have great compassion for those exiled souls who carry their homeland on the tip of their tongues and seek belonging not in a piece of land but in the line of a poem. The words that flow from their bleeding wounds heal the loneliness within us.
Now, I would like to say this while looking into your eyes as we sip our coffees together in a dimly lit cafe where it is raining softly outside: Rootlessness is actually a painful but very compassionate teacher that expands the boundaries of the heart and makes a person a citizen of the whole earth. Not being able to take root in one place leaves the possibility of blooming everywhere on our shoulders with compassion.
Perhaps our real homeland is not the land we step on, but those short moments when we are fully accepted with all our flaws and wounds. Really, where is that first and deepest shelter where your soul silently anchors after being blown in the wind and says "I'm home now"?