I moved to Luxembourg in the year 2020. This sounds like a humblebrag until you’ve actually done it in the month of December. I had traded Indian sunshine, the loud, sweaty, everyone-is-in-your-business kind of vibe for a country so quiet I could hear my own thoughts – and my thoughts, at that time, were terrible company.People love the idea of living abroad. These are people who have not spent a Tuesday afternoon watching grey turn into a slightly darker grey; whose YouTube feeds are not dominated by easy-to-cook-weeknight-dinners; who most certainly have not had to deadlift groceries twice a week. My great daily entertainment was the window above my desk where I could count the humans walking past our home. Three on a normal day. Four if the universe was feeling generous. Once I counted five and actually treated myself to a G&T. Often, I would find myself sitting in a café, getting a flat white in the most Instagram-able cups, surrounded by conversation and understanding precisely nothing. It is a peculiar kind of loneliness, being illiterate in other people’s chatter.I also kept falling sick. The chores never ended. And somewhere between the laundry and the tenth identical cold, gloomy afternoon, a small thought showed up one day and refused to leave: maybe you shouldn’t have come. The locals did not help. They seemed aloof, shut, faintly rude. I concluded that the entire country had held a meeting and agreed not to like me.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThen came Friday.We’d done the big grocery run, the survive-a-pandemic kind, because we were still adjusting to a post-COVID world. On the bus back, both arms full, still new enough to the public transportation system that the stop button felt like a device I might accidentally detonate, I bundled us off at our stop in a small panic and felt, for maybe four seconds, competent.Then I reached for my phone. No phone. The phone was on the bus! The bus was now a small dot on the horizon, carrying my entire digital life to a destination unknown.I have a statistics degree, so my instinct in any crisis is to calculate the odds, and the odds here were not good. It was Friday evening. The bus service office had shut, presumably to go enjoy the weekend I was no longer having. We rang numbers using my husband’s phone but nobody answered. We began drafting a plan to walk to the police and file a report for the missing phone. Forty minutes passed like this, me cursing the city, my choices, destiny in general. In that specific flavour of despair, you only feel farther away from home, over something small, when the small thing has quietly started standing in for something much bigger.And then the bus came back. Not another bus with the same number. The same bus. I recognised the driver – a woman I’d said ‘Bonjour’ to when I got on, one of maybe two hellos I’d managed all week.The doors hissed open. I ran towards the bus. Before I could get any words out, the driver held out my phone. I don’t remember her exact words, my French was dreadful then and my brain was busy short-circuiting. But I remember her face. Unbothered. Matter-of-fact. As if returning a stranger’s phone at the tail end of her Friday was simply the obvious thing that a person does.Here is the thing nobody warns you about belonging: you don’t decide it, and you almost never see it coming. I had spent months building a thorough legal case against this place: exhibit A, the greyness; exhibit B, the silence; exhibit C, three people a day. One bus driver returning the phone defused the entire case I had built for months.Nothing about Luxembourg changed that evening. It was still cold. I still couldn’t eavesdrop. But something in me shifted. The aloof, unfriendly people I had so carefully invented in my head turned out to include someone who would notice a phone, correctly guess it belonged to the flustered foreigner two stops back, and bring it back. The place had not rejected me. I had just been misreading it, the way you misread someone who is shy and decide they are cold.I have stayed here for five years since. I learned the tram routes, made peace with the grey, and eventually even found the quiet lovely. But if you ask me when Luxembourg turned from a place I was stuck in, into a place I lived in, it wasn’t the visa, or a house, or a friend. It was a lost phone, forty minutes of panic, and a woman whose name I will never know, handing back a great deal more than she realised.Subarna Mukherjee is an entrepreneur and runs a marketing technology firm from Luxembourg, where she now knows the bus schedules by heart.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.