Edel Coffey: A college reunion brought a liberating realisation last week 

Edel Coffey muses on what home means in this week's column 

Last week I went to a college reunion that was not mine but still managed to bring me on a trip down memory lane regardless. The event took place around my old stomping grounds of Dublin 2, the area where I lived for many years and spent some of my happiest times.

It was here that I passed my single and independent years, gallivanting around town by night and working hard in jobs that I loved by day. It was a safe and pretty area, leafy and sedate, a sleepy village just a few minutes' walk from the city centre.

The canal with its bronze statue of Patrick Kavanagh perched on a bench was just a stone’s throw from my front door and I marked the passing of the seasons in the changing colour of the canal water and the trees reflected therein as I tripped back and forth over the narrow locks every day.

Returning last week to this area where I had lived for so many years was intoxicating, not least because nothing had changed since I had left six years ago.

While the rest of the city feels more and more unfamiliar with each visit — traffic flowing in unfamiliar patterns, clear blue sky where buildings used to stand (and vice versa) — this area had remained the same. It felt like I had never left. 

I still knew local secrets like where to get the best coffee, where to grab some good food on the go, and which side-streets to shortcut through. 

Even the traffic lights sequence on the junction of the street where I had lived still had that delayed right-turn filter light that lazily showed up five seconds too late and played havoc with jay-walking pedestrians.

It felt like the intervening six years hadn’t happened at all. It felt like all of the things that I had experienced since I had left might just be dreams of a parallel life. Maybe a parallel me was still living here in Dublin 2, I thought, going about her business, cycling the alternate-universe version of the bicycle that now sits decommissioned with a puncture in my garage in Galway.

But some things had changed too, I realised. I no longer felt the pang of homesickness that I used to feel when I visited this place before, the deep longing to return to what I thought of as home. I found I could enjoy being in the place I used to live without the accompanying sadness of wanting to live there again.

This realisation was liberating, not least because I have spent much of the last six years feeling homesick, missing the people that I love and the places that are inscribed with deep biographical meaning for me, which is all just part of the luxurious privilege of never having been displaced.

This realisation came in tandem with a dawning awareness that a sense of belonging can come from more than just places. A few weeks ago, I went out for a walk that ended up being nearly as epic as Leopold Bloom’s because I kept bumping into people I knew. 

By the time I stopped for the fourth time to talk someone, a memory floated up of a not-so-distant time when I could walk the length and breadth of Galway without meeting a single person I knew. 

I realised all of a sudden that I had gradually become part of a community, that I might even belong here now. I wondered was it people then, and not places, that made us feel like we truly belong.

The need to belong is a basic part of our human nature. It operates in the same centres of our brain that react to hunger and pain. It’s why Covid played such havoc with our mental health, that sense of belonging, of community, was eroded so much by isolation.

Depression, anxiety, and suicide are associated with lacking a sense of belonging. Perhaps that need to belong is why we organise events like college reunions too, to protect those precious bonds with the people we were once so connected to, and to remind ourselves that we do still belong even though we may now live 3,000 miles across the world from each other.

Revisiting the streets where I used to live, and realising that it was no longer home felt strangely OK. If this was no longer home, then where was, I wondered? The answer came quickly. I didn’t want to linger on those old streets of Dublin 2 or by Patrick Kavanagh on his leafy-with-love banks of the canal or the old Georgian houses that lined my old road, not because I don’t still love them all but more because home for me now is no longer a place.

Home for me now is a locus that is stronger than bricks and mortar, man-made waterways and grassy knolls. The pang I felt now was not an urge to go back to the place that I once called home but instead to go back to where my children were, in Galway, awaiting my return. Home for me now really is where the heart is.