All the Places I Didn’t Stay
Six cities, twelve years, and the restlessness that outlasted all of them.
There are twenty-one tabs open on my laptop. Twelve of them are apartment listings. Not for Athens. For somewhere else. I haven't decided where yet. Which means I've already decided.
One of the tabs is for home. I close that one first.
I make coffee. Close the rest. Open them twenty minutes later and now there are somehow thirty-one. The neighbourhoods get more specific. I start converting rent into dollars, which I only do when I've already left in my head.
The leaving always starts the same way. A numbness first, something that was running just stops. Then the itch, physical, under the skin, nothing I can reason with. And then the knowing, which is the worst part, because once it's there, staying feels like sitting in a place that's already closed. Then the living just stops, I stop trying to make friends, find events to attend, date. Why would I? I'm leaving anyways. Everything looks the same. But it's over and I know it, and now I'm just waiting for my body to catch up with what my brain already decided. That's when the tabs open.
It played out differently every time. In Prague, the numbness came in month seven. In St Andrews, it was somehow always there right from the beginning. In Accra, it went quiet for six months, which isn't the same thing as finding what I was looking for, but it felt good at the time. In Copenhagen, it showed up dressed as ambition, which I let it do because it was more convenient. In Bangkok, it didn't get to come at all, but that's a different story. In Athens, I was sure, genuinely sure, that I'd finally outrun it, that I had found my home and could build a life there. One where I was happy, one where I wasn't running anymore. And this time, I honestly really thought I did.
Yet somehow, I'm on tab thirty-seven.
PRAGUE.
One year. Visa expired.
I was eighteen and I needed to leave. Staying wasn’t an option. Home was a place to get through, not a place to begin. So I left. That's it. That's the whole reason.
I picked Prague because the flight was long enough to feel like a statement and the visa was cheap and I needed somewhere far enough from home that I could try on a different version of myself without anyone who knew me seeing.
A nine-hour flight from home. I checked.
I had a room in Žižkov with a courtyard outside the window. I had a job at a call centre selling broadband to people in Birmingham who didn't want to be called as much as I didn't want to call them — at least we had that in common. I made friends with other people who also came from somewhere else and were in the middle of becoming someone new, though none of us could've told you what.
I think it might’ve been the first time I wasn’t just surviving. It was good. I think it was good. When I try to remember what good felt like there, I can't quite get hold of it, but I know it was there because of how precisely I remember the moment it left.
Month seven. I woke up and the courtyard was just a courtyard. Something had gone quiet and I didn't know what it was or how to get it back. I just knew something had shifted, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't shift it back. I told myself it was February. I made plans for spring. I sat in the same cafes and walked the same streets and smiled at the right times and inside I was already somewhere else, somewhere that was going to be different, somewhere I couldn't name yet.
I know now what it was. The numbness. The first stage. But at eighteen, I just thought I was restless. I thought I needed somewhere new.
The visa expired. I packed. I flew home and spent three weeks nodding along while my friends told me about their first year at university and the new friends they made. How their lives had kept going without me, which I knew would happen but that didn't stop it from feeling like I was out of place here; like I was haunting a life that had quietly moved on without me.
I booked my next flight before the jet lag wore off. I told everyone Prague had run its course.
ST ANDREWS.
Three years. Degree finished.
I didn't choose St Andrews the way I chose Prague. Prague was desire. St Andrews was a spreadsheet. Right program, right funding, right visa.
The knowing never arrived in St Andrews because nothing ever really started there. It wasn’t a chapter ending, just a chapter that wouldn't open. The town was beautiful and small and completely sealed.
I don't think it was St Andrews. I've thought about it enough to know it wasn't. I arrived already at a distance from everything, already measuring the gap between where I was and where the story was supposed to go, and no place was going to close that from the outside.
So instead of the knowing, I had just had the itch. Constant and low, the itch of waiting for something to start that kept not starting. I stood at my window in winter with the North Sea sitting there being dark and flat and indifferent and waited for something to happen inside me.
Nothing happened.
I graduated on a Thursday and had a flight booked for that Saturday. People acted like this was surprising.
ACCRA.
Six months. Semester abroad.
Before we leave St Andrews, there's something that happened in the middle of it. A semester abroad, second year. I picked Accra because I wanted to be the kind of person who picked Accra. I wanted to be different, interesting, unique. The kind of person who could handle the adventure I thought it would be.
I know. I know. I was twenty-two and halfway through a degree in a town I hated and the semester abroad program had twelve countries and everyone around me was picking Australia and the USA, and I looked at the list and picked Ghana and felt immediately like I'd said something about myself. Something flattering. I packed that self-image into my luggage and got on the plane, and it survived about a week before Accra started being a real place instead of a decision I'd made about my own character.
The real Accra was faster and louder and more demanding than anything I'd been in before. The traffic that ate entire afternoons. People who were generous with me in ways I hadn't earned. Once I stopped performing the experience of being there, I found I was just there, which was different and better.
The numbness lifted. The itch went quiet. Not because I'd found what I was looking for – I don't think that's what happened. I think the knowing never came because it didn't need to. There was already a return ticket from the day I landed. The ending was already there, six months away, close enough to see. The question of leaving was never open, so the knowing never had to arrive. Maybe that's all it takes.
The semester ended. I went back to St Andrews to finish the degree. The itch came back on the flight there.
COPENHAGEN.
Two years. A door I found convenient.
I arrived in Copenhagen at twenty-three absolutely convinced I was going to stay.
I want to be clear about that. I wasn't drifting. I was trying. Bigger city, real city, somewhere with enough room to finally build a life. The masters was what I wanted and Copenhagen was where it was, and underneath the practical reasons was the thing I always had underneath everything, the hope that this would be the place, that I'd finish the degree and not need to leave because I'd already be someone who lived here.
Copenhagen's a good city. Genuinely. Clean and functional and beautiful in a quietly reasonable way; the light on the water in winter; everything working the way things are supposed to work. I kept waiting for it to surprise me. It never did. It was just there, competent and pleasant, and I was inside it doing my degree and cycling the same routes until the routes stopped feeling like choices.
The knowing didn't come the way it had in Prague. No specific morning, no switch. More like I looked up one day and realised I'd stopped expecting Copenhagen to become something, some place that I could stay, a place that would become home. But I quietly set down the hope somewhere without noticing and started just getting through the weeks. I stopped looking for whatever I was trying to find there, which at the time felt like the same thing as not finding it. Looking back, I realize you can’t really find home when you don’t even know what home looks like.
The thing is, I think I would've stayed. I've never said that out loud but I think it's true. I would've finished the degree and found a reason and called it a decision and been fine, probably.
But then the NGO posting went up. Bangkok. Education access work. The kind of role I told people I couldn't possibly turn down.
What I didn’t tell anyone at the time is that I had been checking that organisation's website for three months before the posting appeared. I submitted an application two weeks before the deadline. I said yes before I'd finished reading the email and then spent two days constructing the story about it being too good to miss, which was true, and also not the whole truth, and I knew the difference.
Copenhagen let me go the way it had kept me, and without making anything personal. I told everyone it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I still believe that.
BANGKOK.
Seven months. Was always going to end.
I was excited about Bangkok in a way that had nothing to do with the city. The internship was everything I'd spent two years working toward.
Eight months. That was the internship, the contract, the visa. Eight months of NGO work and then done. The date was printed on the paperwork before I'd even landed. I knew it going in. That was the deal. A part of me knew that’s what I needed to feel at peace somewhere — a clear end date.
The plan was to go back to Copenhagen. I'd told people. I'd said it out loud, which I almost never do. I don't know if I believed it. I don't know if I would have gone back.
But I was in Bangkok now. The heat hitting me every time I walked outside. The city open all night. I made real friendships, the kind where I didn't perform anything. There was a place near my building that started making my order when they saw me turn the corner. I did work that actually felt like it meant something, that asked me to be present in a way nothing had before.
And being present meant I wasn't thinking about any of it. Not Copenhagen, not the pattern, not what came next. Just the work. Just Bangkok.
Then COVID arrived and the city changed overnight. The streets went quiet in a way they weren't built for. The NGO became unrecognisable. Before the eight months were up, I was on a plane back to my childhood home with two suitcases. Copenhagen never came up again. I didn't bring it up, either.
Bangkok didn't get to finish the way it was supposed to. Cut before its own ending, before the date on the paperwork, before whatever was waiting at the end of those eight months. It just sits there now, the last few pages missing. Not tragic. Just unfinished in a way none of the others are.
That's the thing about Bangkok that I can't put down – not that it ended early, but that I'll never know. Every other city, I was the one who left. Bangkok, I was removed from. That sounds like a difference that matters, but I'm not sure it does, and I'm not sure it doesn't, and I've had five years to figure that out and I still can't.
I watched Bangkok reopen from my childhood bedroom. When restrictions lifted, I didn't go back. The ending it was supposed to have was gone. Going back would just be a different city with the same name and I've had enough of those already.
I told myself I wanted somewhere new. I told myself Athens.
ATHENS.
Eighteen months and counting.
There are thirty-seven tabs open on my laptop. I know. I said that already.
I chose Athens at 27 the way you choose something when you've run out of excuses to be careless. Not hopefully. Deliberately. I researched for months from my childhood bedroom. Neighbourhoods, winters, cost of living, the light that everyone who'd lived there tried and failed to describe properly. I was going to stay. Not as a wish, but as a plan.
I found an apartment in Exarcheia with high ceilings and morning light and stood in it on the first day and felt certain – in my body before my brain caught up – this is it. It wasn't a feeling but a fact I was reporting to myself.
And I built something here. I didn't arrive and wait. I built deliberately, with everything I had. Work I cared about. Friendships that became real slowly, the way true ones do. A cafe near my building where I spent whole mornings feeling, for the first time in a long time, like someone who lived somewhere. The light on old stone in the afternoons that I never got tired of, not in the sixth month, not in the twelfth. I loved this city. I chose it every day. I was going to stay.
I don't know exactly when the feeling came back. That's what I can't make peace with about Athens. I was so certain, I'd been so careful, that I think I argued with it for a while before I admitted it was there. Told myself it was a bad week. Told myself every life has quiet patches. Told myself that I've done enough therapy to know this wasn't about the city. Told myself I'd chosen this and that meant something.
But the knowing doesn't care what I had chosen. It doesn't care how long I took deciding or how much I built or how certain I was on the first or the hundredth day. It arrives when it arrives.
I laid in bed that night and thought not here. Not this one. Not after everything I did to make this the last one. And then the thought, quieter and worse than the knowing — I’m almost thirty. I’m almost thirty and it came back anyways. This something I haven’t figured out yet – is this just what I am?
I'm so tired. I'm so tired of this being what I want. What I’m good at doing.
The itch didn't answer. It just got louder.
There are forty-five tabs open.
Afterword
I've been thinking about what it means that the feeling doesn't care.
It came for Prague, which I chose at 18 on impulse, and it came for Athens, which I chose at 27 with everything I knew. It doesn't care what I've built or how certain I've been or how much I loved the place. It just comes. This chapter isn't the last one. There's somewhere after this.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I stayed. Felt the knowing and didn't move. Sat in the finished chapter and waited to see what was on the other side of it. Whether it'd pass. Whether there is an other side.
I wonder if there's a last city. If I'll keep going until I've been everywhere and the knowing comes anyway and there are no tabs to open and I have to finally sit with it and find out what it actually wants from me.
I’ve tried to name the thing I’m looking for. I think it’s a feeling. But I’ve had twelve years and six cities and I still can’t. When I reach for it there’s nothing there. Just blank space. And I don’t know if that means I just haven’t found it yet or if there's nothing to find. That maybe the looking and the leaving aren’t pointing anywhere. That they’re just a part of who I am, what I do.
I still think about all the parts of me I've left in all the places, as if by leaving enough of myself behind in enough cities means I'll eventually run out of self to carry forward and have to stop.
The Prague girl I'm mostly glad is gone. She left an environment she wasn’t going to survive. She was brave. But she was performing something, and she was bad at it, and she needed to keep moving before anyone noticed, including her. I don't miss her, though I think she'd have liked who we became.
I'm not sure the St Andrews girl ever existed. Three years and I'm not certain I was actually there. I look for her and find a window and the North Sea and someone waiting for her life to start. Maybe that one doesn't count.
The Accra girl, I can only hold for a second before she goes blurry. She was there. She was actually there, maybe more than anywhere else, and then she was gone before she knew what she was. Six months isn't enough time to grieve properly. I'm not sure it counted as leaving.
The Copenhagen girl, I feel sorry for. She was trying so hard to be someone who stayed. She would've managed it, too, I think. I think she would have made herself fine. Found a job, a partner, a life there. Set down the search and decided that was peace. I'm not sure if leaving her was cruel or kind.
The Bangkok girl, I miss. Not because Bangkok was the best city or the happiest time, but because she wasn't watching herself. She was just there, just working, just eating street food at midnight and not thinking about what came next. Not searching. Not surviving. Just there. I don't know how to get back to that. Moving back to Bangkok wouldn't do it.
The Athens girl, I'm still arguing with. She's not past tense yet. She's standing in that apartment on the first day certain, the way I told myself I'd finally learned how to be the girl that stayed. I keep trying to explain it to her and she keeps looking at me like I'm the one who got it wrong.
One of those girls must’ve been looking for something. I think it was the Prague one, or maybe the one before her, the one who existed before any of this started, the one that was surviving and knew the only way out was to get as far away as possible. By the time I got to Athens, I'm not sure I was still looking. I think I was just moving. And the terrifying thing isn't that I haven't found it. It's that I'm not sure I'm still someone who's looking for it — whatever it is. That somewhere between Prague and here the looking just became the leaving, and the leaving became who I am, and I don't know which city that happened in or whether I could have stopped it or whether stopping it was ever the point.
My twenties can be explained: I was restless, becoming someone; I had opportunities I couldn't turn down; I was figuring it out, building something. This is what people are supposed to do in their twenties. Except I don’t live there anymore and the feeling is still there. It came back in Athens the same way it came in Prague. Not younger, not older. Just there.
Twelve years. Six cities.
I keep Bangkok close. It's the only city I've ever gone back to visit. Not to stay, just to visit, which is maybe the only way I know how to love a place without it becoming a question.
Outside the window, Athens is doing what Athens does. Ancient, indifferent, the light on old stone that I love and can't feel the way I felt it eighteen months ago standing in my apartment thinking, this is it; this is finally it.
But I haven't outrun it yet.
I know what the tabs mean. I open a new one.