You left. Why are you still living there?
You moved abroad, but years later you're still living in old group chats and waiting to return. How much life can you spend in a waiting room?
You already know every piece of news from the city you left. Who opened a restaurant. Who got fired. Which street they've dug up again. Which acquaintance isn't speaking to which other acquaintance anymore.
In the city where you live now, it's your third year of not knowing your neighbor's name.
But you can confidently explain why everything here is wrong.
At first, it was temporary. Wait it out. See what happens. Don't buy too much, don't get attached, don't make serious plans. Why learn the language if you're going back soon?
Then a year passed. Then another. The temporary apartment filled up with bags, the temporary job became routine, and the decision is still postponed until the next news update.
You've built yourself a waiting room with monthly rent. Nobody ever promised your flight would board.
I'm not going to tell someone who lost their home to just smile and fall in love with a new country. You can miss people, your language, your street. You can be angry about being forced to leave. Sometimes all you have the energy for is paperwork and getting through tomorrow.
This isn't a contest to see who becomes a local fastest. And being grateful for safety doesn't require you to be thrilled with every bus.
But there is a difference between the pain of loss and the habit of spending years keeping everything new at a distance. Especially when the first has become a convenient explanation for the second.
You say it's impossible to make friends here. But the only people you meet are people you can spend the whole evening discussing how impossible it is to make friends here with.
You say the locals are cold. Meanwhile, you compare everything they suggest with how things were back home. Their holidays are strange, the food is wrong, the service is slow, and the people are just somehow wrong too.
Maybe you simply aren't a good fit for each other. Not everyone has to like every country. But it's strange to demand a sense of belonging from a place you tell every day that it's a temporary mistake in your biography.
Then there's your phone. Old news in the morning. Old arguments at lunch. Old group chats in the evening. Your body went to the local shop, while all your attention spent another day several thousand kilometers away.
No wonder you're feeling stuck after moving abroad. You're hardly ever here.
You can stay connected to home. But if that connection takes up all the available space, there's literally nowhere for a new life to fit. You haven't left it even one fucking evening.
Maybe the hardest thing to admit is that you can want to return, but there's no guarantee you will. The city will change. People will move away. You'll become someone else yourself. Even a ticket home won't restore the particular life you miss.
So learning the language now doesn't mean betraying your past. Buying a decent bed doesn't mean signing a commitment to stay forever. Making a friend here doesn't mean you stop loving the people back there.
You can make today livable without signing a lifelong contract with it.
Maybe you'll go back. Maybe you'll move on. Maybe you'll stay in the place you ended up almost by accident. None of those options requires you to spend several years in emotional storage first.
Start with something that exists nearby. A conversation. A route. An activity that has nothing to do with endlessly discussing leaving. A place you enjoy coming back to in the evening.
Time doesn't pause when you emigrate. These years count as part of your life too.
And nobody will give them back afterward with an apology: “We didn't realize you hadn't started living yet.”