COVID, and Being Stuck Between Two Worlds

When the borders closed in March 2020, we hadn't been back to Serbia in 18 months.

We had planned to visit that Easter. We had bought the tickets. Then the world stopped.

I remember the moment we realised we weren't going. My mother-in-law called. She was crying. We were crying. The kids didn't fully understand, but they understood enough.

Perth went into lockdown. The city, which had always felt a little empty to me, became genuinely empty. We stayed home. We cooked Serbian food. We called family every day.

And something strange happened.

In the absence of the ability to go back, we stopped thinking about going back.

We started thinking about staying.

Not because we had given up on Serbia. But because Perth was where our kids' friends were. Where our routines were. Where our life — the new one, the one we had built from nothing — actually was.

I don't know if that was grief or growth. Probably both.

What I know is that COVID, as terrible as it was, forced us to make a decision we had been avoiding: This is home now.

We are still Serbian. We will always be Serbian. But we are also Australian. And that is not a betrayal. It is just the truth.