Third Culture Chronicles

it’s the smallest subspecies of reindeer on the planet and it loves you

the svalbard reindeer is also the northernmost herbivore in the world, and during winter they survive an average of −16°C (3°F) weather

look at those small fluffy ears and kind eyes, the reindeer is cheering you all on to stay strong in these trying times 

just like the arctic winter, this too shall pass

Melissa is another TCK whom I interviewed. She is a 3x Passport Holder: Peruvian, Italian and American.She has lived in Florida, North Carolina, Mexico, Peru, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and is currently based in London.

No, I don’t miss my country like you miss yours, where you long for the familiar ways that people look, think, act, the tastes and sounds and colours that bring back sentiments of the past. The sense that you are exactly where you belong. No, I don’t miss home like you miss it.

I miss home like a man in the desert misses water. Belonging is a human need, like water, like oxygen, like love. And I can see the mirages of home, watch others drink at the pools, but unable to touch them myself. I miss home like a starving man watching others feast. It’s a visceral hole in my soul that I can fill temporarily but the pain always comes back.

I never had a country I considered mine.

There is no place to go back to, because the places I have been exist in pockets of time and lenses of childhood viewpoints. I never got to watch a place grow, and grow with it. If I try to go back somewhere all the sights the sounds the tastes the smells have changed and it is no longer the place that exists in my memory.

Where you can go back thirty years later and all the sights are different, but everyone there remembers it the way you remember it. They sound like you do. They think like you do. And I will never have that.

I don’t miss home like you miss home when you’re away, where you miss it but you know that you can go back. I miss home like a man out of Pompeii, dislocated.

Marianna is a TCK living in London for the past 5 years now, she previously lived in the Italy and the U.S. She holds a French and American passport.

And then the gorgeous purple Decepticon one: 

also, it’s not red carpet but I refuse to ignore these beauties: