I woke up again with the taste of lager and potato crisps in my mouth. I immediately
smell the scent of last night’s spliff, lingering like the perfume of your loved one after they leave for work while you stay curled up in bed. I’ve woken up in a similar state in the past weeks, and I still can’t get used to it. Every morning I rise and I feel weakness.

The best way I’ve found to cleanse my sins from last night (and the previous hundreds of nights) is a long hot shower, a window of time where I forget all of my environmentalism and spend decades standing still under the stream: “I’m vegan, I’m
already doing my share for the planet”, I say to myself in a silly attempt to justify my wrinkly fingers, the steam-filled bathroom and the redness of my skin.

Much to my surprise I feel content on my way to work. As I start walking down my street (Stokes
Croft, in Bristol) its familiarity comforts me, as it has happened in the past three years since I moved here, that is until my eyes rotate 45 ominous degrees and I see Café Cuba, with its
warm sunny vibes and its collection of flags from Caribbean countries.

One flag seems to be missing, but my mind immediately fills the gap: it’s the flag of Venezuela, yellow blue and red, burning red. It is my first home, and like me, it has always fought a battle of belonging.

Now before I continue to bore you with my personal story, allow me to bore you with a
bit of Venezuelan history. The reason our flag was not there is because most of our Caribbean brothers don’t recognise us as such, not out of resentment or pride, but out of mere geographical indifference. It doesn’t seem to matter that every wave kissing our shores comes from the Caribbean Sea, because for them, we are just continental South Americans, totally alien to their islander lifestyle. But do we feel like we only belong to this pillaged subcontinent? We, who learned to play baseball while the rest of our brothers kicked a football around. We, who have walked the white-glazed Andes and the equally white sand of our archipelagos. We, who were driven by 500 years of history to the centre of the colourful Latin American gradient.

These thoughts rushed through my mind as I kept walking and while I clocked in, and became stronger when I saw my colleagues’ faces: she is from Zambia, he is Spanish, and if you look deep into their eyes you’ll find the same tribulations that I had at this point, you’ll find that we are all the same, full-time roamers trying to find a definition of home.

Home is a topic that many authors and philosophers have tried to tackle before, like
Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel laureate in Literature that lived most of his life in his hometown of Cairo. Mahfouz said that “home is where all your attempts to escape cease”, and I completely agree with the man. We the migrants are led by a non-stopping inertia. We were thrown off a catapult and we’re not able to stop and put down our roots. Home becomes a blurry image flashing beneath our feet, and all we can do is try and rebuild it
from the thin air we’re moving through. This is our pain and our struggle.

As a way of coping with all of this in the middle of a busy shift, and taking advantage of my role as a waiter, I tried to connect with as much people as possible. It’s like I said to myself “If I don’t belong anywhere, I’m going to try to belong everywhere”. I started to see customers as brothers and sisters, some of them wonderful people, some of them
real assholes… but that’s a story for another time.
I quickly realised that, in a way, all of my new brothers and sisters were also in their own
quest for belonging. People like Nadine, who said the food reminded her of her mum’s
cooking, Richard, who at this point was as familiar to us as a piece of our furniture, and
Dave, a man that is clearly drowning in a sea of loneliness but whose only action is to
drown himself every other night in a sea of Amstel.

Dave feels good here with us. People come up and say hi, I ask him where he’s been the past few days, we all help Dave to stop and rest his weary feet before he has to resume his erratic march to the land of belonging. It struck my mind while I was pouring Dave his fourth pint that we can all be not only the traveller, but also the destination. We can be the warm shell that is home, we can be –
sometimes only for a fleeting second- that place where someone looks up, wipes the
sweat from their forehead, and sighs with relief.

I handed the tall glass to Dave and started to chat with him, since it was late and there was little else to do. We spoke about his last holiday, the latest events at his job, the odds of Liverpool winning the league this year… it didn’t matter what we said, it only mattered that for now, my brother was home.

I finished shortly after and I made my way back to my house smiling. Something had clicked in my head and the ghosts were starting to fade away, like the lights of the cars passing me by.

I went to my room with a bottle of beer and rolled a celebratory spliff, for tonight I was home. For tonight home was everywhere.