Kenyan-born Wambui Njuguna moved to the United States as a child. She has lived and worked in Chile and the United Arab Emirates. She credits her great-grandmother, an English woman who lived in Estonia with her Danish husband, with giving her the tenacity of wanting to make an international relationship work.

These days I have a Joni Mitchell song running through my mind. You know, the one advising that, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” This is how I feel about Finland, the country I never thought to visit, let alone try to live in for an extended amount of time. I’m one of those love immigrants who moved to Helsinki to be with my Finnish boyfriend. Things were going quite smoothly until my residence/work permit was delayed. Without going into the details, I find myself at the end of my 90-day tourist permit, with a flight booked to America, return date uncertain and my future status in Finland in the hands of Finnish immigration bureaucracy.

This affinity for Finland unexpectedly crept up on me. I wouldn’t say that I’m fully integrated into the society by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, you might say that I’m experiencing the classic symptoms of culture shock: isolation, linguistic frustration (despite the fact that everyone is so accommodating with speaking English), and lack of identity in my new surroundings. Since I’m travelling for work, an irregular routine in Helsinki naturally makes integration much more difficult. Despite the fact that living abroad is not new to me, it doesn’t seem to have gotten much easier.

Every country presents unique challenges, and even though I have experience as an expat, this has left me with a greater sense of frustration. The patient understanding that there are no shortcuts as a newcomer has eluded me. And so, with this rocky mental landscape, I’m utterly surprised at this revelation: Living in Finland is hard at the moment, but leaving it is even harder. What makes this so? It could be that I’m leaving at a time when the Finnish summer is at its most charming. The weather is beautiful, nature stunning and abundant. People are friendly and enjoying their precious time with the sun. It could be the straight-forward and uncomplicated sense of being I get from the people I encounter, or their wickedly dry, unabashed sense of humour.

Being quiet isn’t considered anti-social here, and acting too positive is generally seen as insincere. It could be that I have found refuge in a burgeoning friendship. I have been told on various occasions that it takes a Finn a good, long while before befriending someone, but when he or she does, that friendship lasts. Coming from America, where the welcome can be warm but sometimes superficial, friendship is often a fluid phenomenon. This isn’t a treatise on which culture is better to foreigners, but rather, the workings of my mind as it seeks to understand itself in this country.

It could be that, while I sometimes long to be in the country of my formative years, whose culture I understand and values I emulate, probably more than I care to know, Finland has slowly and quietly, without me even noticing, worked its way into my heart. I came here for the love of a Finnish man; I would like to stay here for the love of all things Finnish. Idealistic? Misinformed? Perhaps. Nevertheless, on the eve of my departure back to the States, I find myself Finland, dreaming.