There’s a specific kind of silence that happens in an apartment after you’ve packed your life into boxes. Not the peaceful kind, the kind that sounds like endings.

In September 2025, I stood in my childhood bedroom in Turkey and stared at three suitcases on the floor. That was it. Five years of pharmacy school, a lifetime of friendships, my mother’s kitchen, the familiar hum of my city, all of it compressed into a few kilograms of clothing, documents, and carefully wrapped memories.

What Stays, What Goes

The hardest part wasn’t the packing itself. It was the choosing.

My diploma came, obviously. My white coat, folded tight. A small framed photo of my parents at my graduation. My favourite Turkish coffee cups, the ones with the hand-painted tulips, took up absurd amounts of space, but I refused to leave them behind. Some things are heavier than their weight.

I left behind most of my books. My winter coat that was too thin for Swiss winters anyway. A collection of lecture notes I’d kept “just in case.” And something harder to name, the comfort of knowing every street corner, every shortcut, every face at the neighbourhood pharmacy where I’d done my internship.

Landing in a New Country

Zurich airport at 7 AM has a very particular quality of light. Everything is precise, the signage, the floors, the way people move through the terminal with quiet purpose. After Istanbul’s beautiful chaos, it felt like stepping into a photograph.

I remember standing at the luggage carousel, watching my three suitcases appear one by one, thinking: this is everything I own in this country. A pharmacist with five years of training, and right now I’m just a person with three bags and a student visa.

The taxi ride to my new apartment took twenty minutes. I spent it pressing my face to the window like a child. The lake. The mountains in the distance. Trams that arrived exactly on time. It was beautiful and foreign and slightly terrifying.

The First Night

My apartment was smaller than my room back home. A single bed, a desk, a window that looked out onto a quiet street lined with trees I couldn’t name yet. I unpacked the coffee cups first — placed them on the kitchen shelf like tiny ambassadors from my old life.

That night, I made Turkish coffee on a Swiss stove, sat on the floor because my chair hadn’t arrived yet, and called my mother. She asked if I’d eaten. I lied and said yes. Some things don’t change, no matter how far you go.

What I Know Now

Looking back, those three suitcases taught me something I couldn’t have learned from any textbook. Home isn’t the things you carry, it’s the willingness to start building again.

I still don’t have much. My apartment has slowly filled with Swiss practicalities: a proper winter coat, a half-price coffee maker from Migros, a transit pass I’m unreasonably proud of. But the tulip coffee cups still sit on the top shelf, and every morning they remind me: I came here with almost nothing, and I’m making it work.

Three suitcases. That’s how much space a new life takes up. Everything else, you build along the way.