This isn't Kansas anymore!

Heimat.

There is no English equivalent for it. I didn't know that, tried to look it up and as expected ended up with 'home', which doesn't do it justice. Home is... true, where your heart is - and this is as much of a platitude as I can come up with - a place to come back to, a place to feel safe at, to belong to... but still. Heimat is more.

Looking up one word or another while typing these entries I stumbled upon quite a number of words I couldn't find a decent or fitting equivalent for. 'Das Land der Dichter und Denker'... maybe it is. Probably not. Goethe. Schiller. Büchner. Masterminds of the written word, linguistic poets whose works are for most of my generation a merely tolerable pain during highschool, telling stories that, in their blinded minds, can't compete with the lustrous bestselling yet pointless adventures of Ana Steel or Bella Swan – pieces I wouldn't consider touching unless hell freezes over. Go and read Woyzeck, for God's sake.

Anyway. Equivalents... or rather not. But then the Inuit have about forty different words for snow; call it even.

As I said, home doesn't do it justice. Home, a home, your home, a place that felt like home, it can all be abandoned. Replaced. Not forgotten, but closed up.

A lifeless replica of the brimming spaces that meant the world, preserved in formaldehyde, like most memories revisited only once you get the blues, or pleasantly drunk for that matter, simply another item among those already stored on the countless shelves neatly arranged inside your mind.

LA used to be my home away from home, some sort of second home to come back to a couple of times a year.

To keep a long story short, it isn't anymore.

At all.

Getting back didn't feel right. Or satisfying. In the end it's hard to actually admit it to myself, to speak it out loud, type it down, believe it - but I felt empty walking the streets I used to roam too often. An empty shell, an imprint of what used to be, faded, worn out. Crumbling into dust at touch. Santa Monica. Venice Beach. Beautiful, yet drained of all the colors, a black and white reminder that the world keeps turning, come what may.

It was never about LA, although the steady sunshine had always been a welcome relief from the seemingly neverending rain over here. Home being rather about the people you love, yearn to see, speak to, laugh with, while being 5689 miles away on this side of the pond, which once felt like an insurmountable obstacle but in the end turned out to be nothing more than a mere twelve-hour journey trapped in-between poor in-flight entertainment, snoring neighbors, and 12,000m of thin air below your feet.

Without them, well, what's left is a city that to me seems to unceasingly thrive on the energy of the young and restless chasing their dreams. Tinseltown. Loriot, probably the last honest, witty, great thinker we had, was right: 'Früher war mehr Lametta'.

With Steve being dead, C. and A. up in Sacramento and everyone else scattered all over the States there isn't much there to generate the feeling of home I once felt and longed for. It seems right to let it go, to board it up.

But in the end it was the only home I ever had away from home.

Home, the one place that is so much more than just home: Heimat.

Nothing screams Heimat as much as driving down the freeway at night, being greeted by 'Die Drei warmen Brüder', colorfully illuminated, a red and purple light house in the dark ocean of rooftops that sweeps over the city, making one of its ugliest icons the most beautiful one, at least for those who understand that real beauty can only be found in the most trivial things. It's always about the small things; they ground you, remind you where you come from - your roots. Awe.

It's different. It could never be boarded up, forgotten, abandoned. Impossible, it's who I am. The only place to truly and fully feel perfectly comfortable at, welcomed, accepted, being aware of every house, every street in your hood, every damn graffiti. Knowing your way around, down to the smallest aspect of what life means in this specific part of the country. Cherishing the House of Welf's / Guelph's incredible influence on this city, the fact that they provided three kings to the English throne, a personal union that started in 1714 and ended with Queen Victoria in 1837. A city rebuild after the disastrous demolition it experienced during WWII, my grandmother among the countless Trümmerfrauen that helped rebuild what was left. The dialect, the traditions – Pindopp, Krökeln, Lüttje Lage, to name a few. The people, after all.

'We are blood cells alive in the bloodstream of the beating heart of the country' – I couldn't describe it more accurately. It's hard enough to express these abstract thoughts and feelings with words anyway, to bundle them up and give them a meaning that goes beyond sounding like a love drunken fool wearing rose-colored glasses – and it gets worse if you try it in a language that's not your native one. This is my feeble attempt.

But then, Heimat is ambivalent, like an old couple. To some extent you can't stand being around each other on a daily basis, the routine dragging you down, making you wish for something new and exciting to see, experience, feel, but in the end you can't live without one another either. The perfect irony, making sense in a way hardly anything does. Except for Heimat.

ps. aka Author's note: writing about the unique relationships of long married couples brings me back to Loriot and his superb observation skills of human interaction he showed in each of his sketches, animated or not. If you don't know about his work, make sure to check it out.

He is greatly missed.