Your College Friend Who Moved to Dubai Three Years Ago Just Posted About Coming Home—But She's Not Actually Coming Home
The Dubai homecoming post is a genre now. It means vacation, not return. The difference matters more than anyone wants to admit.
By Maria Garcia
She posted a photo of her boarding pass with a caption about finally coming home. The comments filled up fast: welcome back, missed you, let's catch up. Then someone asked when she's free to meet and she said she's only here for ten days.
Ten days is not coming home. Ten days is a visit with luggage limits and a return flight already booked. But the language stays the same. "Coming home" sounds better than "quick trip between contracts." It sounds like she still belongs here, like the distance was temporary, like Dubai was just a long work assignment and not the place where she actually lives now.
The difference matters because it's the difference between someone who left and plans to stay gone, and someone who's still pretending the door is open both ways. It's easier to say you're coming home than to admit you're a tourist in the city you grew up in.
Three years is long enough that her old friends have moved on. Group chats she used to dominate have gone quiet or split into smaller ones she's not in. The coffee shop where everyone used to meet after class is now a milk tea franchise. Her best friend from college is engaged to someone she's never met in person. These are not things you catch up on over merienda at the mall.
But the homecoming post keeps the fiction alive. It lets her show up without explaining why she's only here for ten days, why she didn't come home for Christmas, why her nephew's birthday video call was at 2 a.m. her time. It lets her family post photos like she's back for good. It lets everyone pretend the gap is smaller than it is.
The unspoken part is that she can't actually come home. Not in any permanent sense. The salary she's making in Dubai doesn't exist here. The rent she's paying there is double what she'd pay in Manila, but it's still a fraction of what she's saving. Moving back would mean starting over at half the income and no savings cushion. It would mean admitting the move was permanent after spending three years telling everyone it was temporary.
So instead, there's the vacation. The ten-day visit. The posts about home-cooked meals and traffic and humidity, all written like complaints but really just proof she was here. And then she's gone again, and the group chat goes quiet, and someone else books a flight and starts drafting their own version of the same caption.
Coming home used to mean something specific. Now it just means your vacation days lined up.
