Experiences shape perspective. The same place can feel completely different to two people, depending on where they come from, what they’ve lived through, and what they compare it to.
Recently, I was talking to an Afghan girl I met at my university in Germany.
She asked me if I would go back to India.
I replied, “Of course. I don’t think I have anything for me here in the long term.” I told her how much I miss my family, my friends, the food, the weather, the culture — the feeling of being home.
Germany, to me, is temporary – a chapter, not a destination.
Then I asked her if she would ever go back to Afghanistan.
She said, “Never.”
“For me,” she explained, “Afghanistan is a cage. Germany is the sky. I don’t have anything waiting for me there. I want to be free.”
None of her family remained in Afghanistan. Some were dead. Some had escaped. She spoke without hope that things would change.
I realised how easily I carry the idea of home. How casually I can miss it, complain about distance, and still know that it is there.
For her, home was not something to return to. It was something to survive.
We are in the same country, studying at the same university, living similar lives on the surface.
And yet we carry entirely different meanings of what it means to be here — and what it means to return.
The place has not changed.
Only our experiences have.
It reminded me that gratitude and longing often come from the same root: comparison. The world looks different depending on what you’ve escaped, and what you still have the privilege of missing.
Some people leave home to grow.
Some people leave home to breathe.