I have lived in two countries long enough to know that neither one stays the way you left it.

I was fourteen when I came to America. Old enough to remember England clearly — the neighbourhood, the game nights around someone’s kitchen table, the winters when the whole street came outside without anyone having to be asked. Old enough to carry those things with me. Young enough, perhaps, to build something new without too much difficulty.

The hardest part was the school. I worried my marks might slip with the change in curriculum, the different way of teaching things. I worried about walking into a place where everyone already knew each other and finding my footing. As it turned out, a teacher took it upon herself to introduce me to four girls on my first visit. We sat together at lunch throughout school. We talked in the corridors. There was a sleepover once, I think in the final year. They were good enough friends for what I needed, and I did not need much. That has always been true of me.

America shaped my adulthood in the way that only the place where you truly begin can. I married here. Built a life here. Became whoever I actually am here, rather than whoever I might have become had I stayed. It is home in the truest sense of the word, not because I was born here or because it has always felt familiar, but because it is where I chose to plant myself and grow.

England exists for me now mostly as memory. When I go back, I am always quietly startled by how much has changed. New buildings where old ones stood. Roads that didn’t used to be there. The places I loved simply gone, replaced by something I have no feeling for. It makes me sad in a way that is hard to explain, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. The sadness of realising that the place you remember never really existed except in a particular moment in time, and that moment has long since passed.

I don’t feel a pull to go back. England is where I am from. America is where I am. Those are different things and I have made my peace with that distinction.

Though I will say this. I still say England when someone asks where I am from. Not America, not both, not it’s complicated. England. Because that is the honest answer, and because some things stay with you regardless of how many years and how many miles sit between you and them.

My accent has never left. People mention it still, after all this time. I don’t mind. It is the most visible reminder of something I carry quietly and don’t often talk about. That I grew up somewhere else. That I remember a different way of things. That I belong, in some sense, to both places and fully to neither.

And that, I have found, is not such a bad thing to be.

— Kate