What Nobody Tells You About Coming Home After Years Abroad

You’ve changed, my father said, before I’d even put my bag down.

I had been in Casablanca for eleven minutes.

Three years in Paris and that was the welcome. Not I missed you. Not how was the flight. Just a verdict, delivered at the door of the same apartment on Boulevard Zerktouni where I grew up, the paint on the balcony rail still chipped in the same spot I chipped it at nine years old.

Baba, I said, can I at least sit down first.

He shrugged and went back to the television, some old football match rerun he’d already watched twice, and I stood there in the hallway with my suitcase, breathing in the smell of his mint tea and thinking about how strange it is to feel like a guest in the house where you learned to walk.

My name is Nabil. I left Casablanca when I was twenty-four, chasing a job in accounting that paid four times what I was making at home, and I told myself it was temporary.

Everyone tells themselves that. Three years later I was still there, still in the same rented studio near Gare du Nord, still sending money home every month and calling it helping, when really it was easier to send money than to send myself.

The thing nobody tells you about expat life is how quiet it gets inside your own head. You start speaking French in your dreams. You start missing things you didn’t even like when you had them, like the smell of exhaust on the tram in Casablanca, or the way vendors on Boulevard Mohammed V shout prices like they’re arguing with you personally.

You start googling cost of living in Casablanca at two in the morning, doing the math on whether you could actually come home and still survive, and the numbers never quite work, and you go to sleep anyway.

My mother had passed the year before. That’s the real reason I came back, if I’m honest, though nobody in my family says it out loud. There’s a hole in a house when someone leaves it, and I think my father had been living inside that hole for a year with nobody to talk to but a television that only shows him replays.

The next morning he made breakfast without asking if I wanted any, just set the msemen and the olive oil in front of me like I’d never left, and we ate in a silence that felt older than both of us.

So, he said finally, what’s the plan.

I don’t know yet.

You don’t know. He said it flatly, not even a question, like he was tasting the words and didn’t like them. Three years in France and you come back with “I don’t know.”

I came back for you, Baba.

I didn’t ask you to come back.

That one landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.

I went for a walk after that, down toward the Corniche, past the mosque, Hassan II, standing over the Atlantic the way it always has, enormous and indifferent, the waves throwing themselves against the rocks below like they had something to prove.

I used to come here with my mother on Fridays after prayer. She’d buy me a Fanta from the same guy every time, an old man named Hamid who still, apparently, remembers me, because he looked up from his cooler and said, Nabil? Is that really you? You got fat in France, and laughed so hard he nearly dropped the bottle.

It was the first time in three years someone had made me laugh without meaning to.

I sat on the wall and watched teenagers doing tricks on their bikes near Rick’s Café, phones out, filming each other for videos nobody but their friends would ever see, and I thought about how much of my life in Paris had felt like that too.

Filming a version of a life for people back home to watch, editing out the parts where I sat alone in my studio eating cereal for dinner because I was too tired to cook, editing out the part where I’d stopped calling because I didn’t know how to explain that I was homesick for a country that, apparently, no longer wanted the version of me it got back.

My cousin Yasmine found me there an hour later. She works at a call center now, handling customer complaints for a French telecom company, on the night shift so the time zones line up, and she looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

He’s not mad at you, she said, sitting down beside me. He’s mad that Mama’s not here and you are.

That’s not fair.

No, she said. It’s not. Nothing about any of this is fair. She pulled her knees up to her chest. You know what’s funny. Everyone here thinks life is better over there. Everyone over there probably thinks it’s easier here. Nobody’s right. Everybody’s just tired in a different language.

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

We sat there until the sun started going down over the water, the kind of orange that makes even a parking lot look like a painting, and somewhere behind us the call to prayer started, first from one mosque and then another, layering over each other the way it always used to when I was a kid and thought that sound was just what evening sounded like everywhere in the world.

I still don’t know what the plan is. I have savings that would stretch further here than they ever did in Paris, enough that I’ve actually started looking, just looking, at small apartments near Maarif, telling myself it’s just research, the same way I used to tell myself Paris was temporary.

My father hasn’t asked again. We eat breakfast in the same silence most mornings, but two days ago he pushed the good olive oil toward me before I even reached for it, the kind we only ever used for guests, and didn’t say a word about it, and I didn’t either.

I keep thinking about what Yasmine said, about everyone being tired in a different language. I keep thinking about the Fanta guy remembering my name after three years like no time had passed at all, and about my father’s voice at the door, flat and hurt, you’ve changed, like it was an accusation instead of just the truth.

Maybe it was both.

I don’t know if I’m staying. I don’t know if there’s still a version of home that fits me the way it used to, or if home is something you have to rebuild every time you come back to it, one breakfast, one bottle of good olive oil, at a time.

Some people spend their whole lives trying to belong somewhere. I spent mine trying to belong to two places at once, and I’m still not sure that’s possible.