There's a particular feeling you only get when you fly home to a place you chose to leave. We feel it every time we land in Nepal.
For us, home is a complicated word now. We grew up there. Our families are there. And yet we've built a whole life on the other side of the world — in Sydney first, then Darwin. So which one is home? The honest answer is both, and neither, and that the question gets harder every year.
The diaspora double-life
When you live between two countries, you're always slightly out of sync. In Australia, you carry Nepal with you — the food, the festivals, the language at home. And then you fly back to Nepal and realise you've changed; that you see the place with slightly different eyes now, half-local and half-visitor.
Going home means falling straight back into family, into old streets and old flavours and the particular warmth of people who knew you before you became whoever you are now. And it also means a small, quiet grief — because you know you'll leave again, and because the place keeps moving while you're away.
You don't lose your home when you migrate. You just end up with two, and a permanent ache for whichever one you're not standing in.
Why we keep going back
We go back because the thread matters. Because our kids — if we're lucky enough to have them — should know where they come from. Because no amount of building a life elsewhere replaces the people and the place that built you.
Every trip home reminds us why The Pretty World exists in the first place: we're diaspora kids, holding two countries at once, trying to do right by both. Going home is how we keep the second one close.
We'd love to share more of Nepal here — those posts are coming.
