Reflection 2
On the Pain of Living Between Two Lives
There is a pain in my chest that I cannot name. It’s not sadness exactly, and it’s not longing. It’s something deeper. Like grief. But for a place that still exists. For a version of me that still exists, just not here.
It physically hurts: my heart, my chest, my breath. I have never felt anything like this before. This is not homesickness. It’s heart-splitting. I lie awake and feel it breaking. This sense of having two lives, two homes, and knowing I cannot live both.
I miss Norway in a way that is beyond words. In the way you might miss a person you love, except this person is a place. A feeling. A rhythm of life. A language I’m still learning but already love. I miss the silence of the mountains, the sound of voices on the bybane, the quiet respect people give you on the street. I miss the way I could breathe. The way my days held space. The way even the architecture seemed to tell me: you can slow down.
And yet, I love people here too. My people. My community. Loved ones who make up the texture of my life in the US. How can I leave them? How do I choose between a place that makes me feel whole and the people who make me feel loved? The friends who remember my birthday. The family who dropped everything during a crisis. The ones who stayed.
It’s not a simple trade. It's not as easy as following your heart when your heart lives in two different countries. And when I left Norway, it wasn’t with regret. It was with clarity. I chose this path. But clarity doesn’t erase grief. It doesn’t soften the sharpness of wondering if you’ve left a part of your soul behind.
There are things I love about Norway that I can’t explain. They live in the pit of my stomach, in the way my chest tightens when I hear Norwegian spoken, in the joy that bubbles up when I walk familiar Bergen streets. How do you explain falling in love with a place that feels like it saw you-- truly saw you-- for the first time?
I am torn. I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know that something in me aches to return. Not just to Norway, but to myself, the version of me who felt free.