When I was a little girl living in Finland, I had a friend who was woven deeply into the fabric of my childhood. Her name was Tiina. We lived only a few hundred metres from each other, and we were in the same class at school. Hardly a day seemed to pass without us together. So often she was at our house that it almost felt as though she lived there too, only going home to sleep. We baked together, played together, wandered through the ordinary little moments of childhood together. On my birthdays, I usually invited only one friend, and it was always her. When I turn the pages of my childhood photo albums now, there she is beside me in almost every photograph, as though the story of those years could not be told without her.

And perhaps it cannot.

Then came migration, and with it, a tearing away.

But I was only eleven years old. I did not understand the true meaning of departure. I did not yet know that moving to the other side of the world was not the same as simply going away for a while. Children do not always recognise finality when it first arrives. They trust. They follow. They carry on as best they can. Only much later do they begin to understand what was taken from them.

Leaving Finland was one loss. Leaving Tiina was another.

At the time, I could not have explained the depth of it, but a great emptiness opened up in my life when I left her behind. I imagine our leaving must have left its own quiet wound in hers as well. Migration changes everything, but for a child, the losses are often wordless. They settle silently into the heart and wait there, sometimes for decades, until life brings them gently back into the light.

It took twenty-four years before I saw my childhood friend again.

We were both thirty-six by then. I still remember standing at her door, about to knock, carrying not only myself but all the years between us. And yet, in my mind, we were still little girls. Still running between houses. Still side by side. Still held inside the small and familiar world where our friendship had first been formed.

When the door opened, I saw something that is very hard to put into words. It was Tiina, and yet not the Tiina I had last seen. There she stood, a grown woman, life written into her face, the years visible in ways they had never been before. And for a moment, before we embraced, we simply stood there and looked at one another. We studied each other quietly, almost reverently, as though trying to recognise the child inside the woman.

That moment has stayed with me.

Because in that moment I understood, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that the body is only the outer shell of the soul. How else can it be that after twenty-four years, after half a lifetime apart, after oceans and continents and entirely separate lives, we still knew each other? Not in the surface way of polite reunion, but in that deeper place. Something in us recognised something in the other straight away. Beneath the changed faces and adult selves, the soul had remained familiar.

There is something both beautiful and heartbreaking in that.

Tiina and I lost too many years from each other’s lives. That is one of the hidden griefs of migration. People speak of countries, languages, homes and opportunities, but they do not always speak of the quiet human cost. The friendships interrupted. The shared growing up that never happened. The birthdays missed. The ordinary years that could not be lived side by side. So much of the personal toll of migration is only understood in hindsight, when you are old enough to look back and measure what was broken, and what somehow survived.

Sometimes life gives, and sometimes life takes away. We do not always have a say in it. That is especially true for child migrants. So much is chosen for you before you are old enough to understand what it will cost.

Because we live fifteen thousand kilometres apart, the time I have had with Tiina in adulthood has been very small. Since that first reunion, I have only seen her two more times. And yet each of those meetings has felt like one of life’s golden moments, those rare and shining gifts that seem to hold far more than their briefness should allow. What joy it has been to sit together and remember. To laugh over childhood memories. To walk back, if only for a little while, into that shared landscape of long ago. There is a tenderness in being with someone who knew you before the world changed you, before life layered itself over your heart, before you became who you now are.

It is only now, later in life, that I am beginning to understand just how important a part of each other’s lives we were, and still are. Some bonds are formed too early and too deeply to ever fully disappear. The cords of childhood may stretch across continents and decades, but they are not easily broken.

Life went on, as life does. My parents chose another road, an unwalked path, and our family made a new life here in Australia. There has been goodness here too. There has been love, family, belonging of another kind. But my childhood belongs to Finland, and Tiina belongs to that world in a way no one else ever could. She was not just my friend. She was part of the landscape of my earliest life, part of the emotional language of those years, part of what made my childhood feel like mine.

I am a migrant child, uprooted and re-rooted into foreign soil. But the heart keeps its own homeland. It keeps the voices, the faces, the streets, the kitchens, the laughter, the friendships that helped shape it. Childhood memories do not ask permission from time. They remain. They wait. They live on inside us as some of the most timeless treasures we will ever carry.