Which direction is home?

On my flight back to Peru after being back in the U.S. for three weeks, I was chatting with my neighbor and mentioned that I had gone home for a visit. Then in the next sentence I said that now I was "coming home to Peru." After saying that, I stopped to think for a moment. Which direction is home? Is it "coming home," or is it "going home"?

Most everyone who moves away from the place they grew up asks themselves that question at least once, but for expats I think it's more pronounced and more nuanced. I lived in San Francisco for a year and a half, but home was always Minnesota.  When I moved there, I knew that I was going to go traveling so I never had any permanent mooring, never set down any roots. San Francisco is lovely and has great coffee and I love it dearly, but it was always just a place I was passing through, a love affair with an expiration date.

Home?

Peru is different. I came here with the intention of seeing what would happen. What happened is that I fell in love, and now I'm living with my Peruvian boyfriend. I'm about to sign a contract that'll take me through to December, and I'm filing the paperwork for my carné de extranjería, or Peruvian green card. I don't know what will happen after that time, but it's clear that I'm staying long enough to put my feet up. We're planning upgrades to the apartment (not the knock-down-the-walls kind, just some badly needed storage and aesthetic updates). And I'm finally going to do what I've been talking about for two years and buy some damn houseplants.

Home?

These are not things you do when you're planning on taking off again soon. And yet, I don't know if I'm ready to call Peru my home. There is a rightness in the word "home," a sense of fitting in.  A feeling like worn-in slippers. When you can say, I belong to this place and it belongs to me.

Minnesota belongs to me. I claim it when I hear a Bob Dylan song on the radio here and excitedly tell people that he was from my state. I claim it when I snort dismissively at other people's idea of cold. ("You don't know what real cold is! Come to Minnesota.")  Lima does not belong to me. The Spanish language does not belong to me.  But little by little, I'm laying claim to my life here.

As Austin Powers said, "Wherever you go, there you are." Maybe Peru is not my home, but I have a pretty kickass thing going for me here, and that's enough for me.