The answer that I didn't give.

I've been reflecting a lot on the question that the kind and cheery doctor asked me at my first appointment with her: how do I feel in Switzerland?

I think it made me want to cry because the truth is that I don't always feel very well here.

It was easy to know that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Gilles; not so easy to come to terms with leaving behind my family, my friends, my (adopted) country, my culture, my language, my profession – everything – to do just that. But I have a relationship better than I could have thought possible with a man I love more than I could have thought possible, and for many reasons that I accept without resentment, that's why I'm here.

Gilles has done and continues to do all he can to welcome me and to promote my integration into the country to which he can trace his roots back over five centuries. He opened his home and his friends and his family – his life – to me and allowed me to find my own place among it all. He encourages and supports me in everything I do (or, significantly, don't do) here.

To a large extent, it's good. It's always getting better, especially now that I speak the language well. It's better now that I have my own friends and activities. It's better now that I've figured out that I always need to say hello, even to surly bus drivers. What's wrong, then?

***

What I've left behind is part of it. I grew up in, and my family still lives in, a city that absorbs me so well it almost feels like we're made of the same material. I moved a thousand miles away from that city, from that family, when I went to university. I always thought I'd go back to it to it, to them. To my home. But for one reason – graduate schools and boyfriends and jobs and state-specific professional licences – after another, I never did.

At the time, a thousand miles seemed like it was so far away. But it wasn't. This distance truly is. I am so far away from my family. They send me photos and little cell-phone films, snippets of their get-togethers, and it's almost like I'm there. But I'm not. I can only watch, later, the constant spectator.

My relationships with old friends are vanishing. I know that many friendships are relevant only in a certain time and place. I am losing ones that I expected to transcend those constraints, though; like I was never even there to begin with, like I left nothing that could be held onto in the future.

***

It's not only what is behind me; it's also what's before me. I could describe this perfect country with only the most glowing of adjectives. It's hard to find fault with it.

But I feel towards it the way I would when admiring a pretty object on somebody else's shelf. It's not mine. This is not my country. Gilles feels like my home but this country doesn't.

I don't know if it ever will.

Bloggie friends: those of you who have made an international or other kind of significant transcultural move, how did you feel? Was the new place always a stranger to you, or did it ever become your home? And if so, how?

contemplating the void.