The Call from Home

My mum called last week.

We covered the weather first, which took longer than you might expect for a country with essentially one weather. Then whether I was eating properly. Then a detailed update on a neighbour I have never met, who has apparently had a difficult winter, though she did not specify why and I did not ask.

Then, just before she let me go: there was a job opening back home. She'd seen it online. "Just thought you'd want to know."

She always says that.

I have lived in London since 2008. Seventeen years, give or take, depending on whether you count the first few months when I was still telling myself it was temporary. I have a flat I love in a city I occasionally hate, which, I think, is the correct relationship to have with London. I have friends here who have seen me at my worst and stayed anyway. I have a commute that costs more than a car and takes about the same amount of time. I have, by any reasonable measure, built a life.

And still. Twice a year, reliably, there is a call. A job listing. A remark, slipped in gently, that Kvinesdal is actually very nice in the summer, Christian.

She is not wrong. It is nice. There are perhaps four weeks in July where it is genuinely spectacular, the fjord goes flat, the light stays until eleven, and you remember exactly why people write poetry about this country. The other forty-eight weeks are fine. They are perfectly fine.

I just happen to live somewhere with theatre and decent coffee and the kind of anonymity you can only get in a city of nine million people, where nobody cares who your family is or what you got up to at seventeen, and where you can go an entire weekend without anyone asking if you have considered moving back home.

(The answer is yes. I have considered it. I consider it for approximately four minutes every July, standing somewhere near a fjord. Then a Toyota goes past playing loud country music with a Confederate battle flag sticker on the back window, and I come back to myself.)

There is a particular kind of guilt that comes with building a life somewhere your parents did not plan for. It is not dramatic. It does not keep you up. It sits quietly in the background, like a browser tab you never close but also never quite get to. You carry it across borders and through airports and on Saturday mornings when you ring home and hear the particular silence between words that means she was hoping you might have news.

I used to re-examine the decision every time this happened. Lay it all out again. The life here versus the life there. The proximity to ageing parents versus the thing I have built. The guilt versus everything else.

At some point, I stopped. Not because I resolved it. I just ran out of energy for the re-examination.

London is home. Norway is also home. These two things are both true and not particularly reconcilable, and I have made a kind of peace with that. My mum has, I am almost certain, a Google Alert set for job boards in my field. She would deny this.

I will call her this weekend. I will tell her London is fine. She will ask if I am eating properly.

I am eating properly.