Am I Home?

It snowed last night. I sat in my childhood bed, watching the glittering flakes fall underneath the streetlamp outside my window, and I felt at peace. It was quiet; no screeching sirens, no dinging bells from the Green Line. I drifted asleep, thinking about my empty apartment in Boston, where the sounds of ambulances and T cars filled the empty space.

Six hours later, I awoke to the muffled hum of a snowplow in my driveway, and I half-asleep smiled with my eyes still closed. I heard this sound almost every winter morning as a kid – and I had forgotten about until it appeared again, a gift.

This Christmas, I returned home with a more confused perception of what home really is. In past years, I took my first steps into our house and invariably remarked how “it smells like home!” But this time, I forgot to even notice the smell. I hugged my parents, I filled a glass of water, and I went to bed.

My bedroom has always felt like a sanctuary for my introverted tendencies, and it still does, but now I feel a sense of detachment from its physical space. During college, when I was plagued with homesickness, I would fly back to Michigan over school breaks and lay in my bed, smelling the blankets washed with my mom’s laundry detergent, flipping through worn journals I filled in high school with cringe-worthy poems and immature rants. I lingered on every detail of my room with a tightness in my throat, dreading my inevitable departure from Michigan, back East again. 

Now, I no longer smell my blankets. My mom replaced my old blue comforter with a white linen duvet, neutral for guests and more aesthetically pleasing than my Pottery Barn Teen kept-too-long bedding. My room’s evolution aptly reflects my own transformation each time I re-enter. Neutral. In some ways, a guest. 

Have I become less sensitive, or more insensitive, or both?

I spent my first Thanksgiving away from Michigan this fall. In fact, I was 9,000 miles southwest in Sydney, Australia, taking advantage of my time off work to visit a college friend who moved back home to be closer to her family. It was one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life, when I hugged her goodbye after graduation, because suddenly Boston felt a little less like home without her.

On the plane ride down to Sydney, I read the following passage from Audre Lord’s poem, “School Note”:

​​“For the embattled

There is no place

That cannot be

Home

Nor is.”

I read it again, considering my growing detachment to Michigan. Am I embattled? I wondered. I stared down at my legs and feet that I had swaddled with the grey airplane blanket, feeling surprisingly warm and content. I looked up and glanced around at the other passengers, sitting in their seats swaddled in their own little blankets, and I thought, perhaps we’re all a little embattled. 

Before the trip, I mentally prepared myself to cry at least once in Australia. Surely, the homesickness, the fear, the loneliness of feeling so terrifyingly on my own would strike and sink its fangs as it had done often in college.

I predicted my day to cry would be on Thanksgiving, expecting to be triggered by some memory like baking a pie with my mom and remembering how far away I was from her. But as it turned out, I was already living in the next day on Australian Eastern Daylight Time when my family sat down for their Thanksgiving meal. I had already moved on.

On the last night of the trip, I layed on my best friend’s bedroom floor while we listened to Noah Kahan and reminisced on our college days. I stared up at the white ceiling and felt inexplicably but undeniably at home. How funny, I thought, to feel at home that night, and to leave the next morning to return to another home. And neither place was Michigan.

 

Flash forward to a few weeks later, and here I am baking with my mom and begrudgingly agreeing to my dad’s family-bonding schemes, including seeing the new Bob Dylan movie. 

While I found Bob Dylan deeply unrelatable as a person (he seemed like a bit of an ass), the movie struck a chord in me. The sound of the iconic organ riff in “Like a Rolling Stone” somehow perfectly encapsulated that odd feeling I now get when I come back to Michigan, when I wonder if my emotional distance is all from a lack of sensitivity or a growing insensitivity or both.

“How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be on your own, with no direction home

A complete unknown, like a rolling stone”

This year’s turning of the calendar page in some ways makes my life feel more unknown. I always thought I would move back to Michigan, but as I get older, my direction home no longer feels reliant upon geography. Now, the people I love feel like home. 

And in most ways, I’m relieved by this development, broken free from the chains of homesickness and the strange need to smell my blankets. I’m happier than I’ve ever felt, having people in my life in Boston, Australia, Michigan, and elsewhere who provide the sense of comfort and safety and love that I used to believe (and feared) I could only feel in my childhood home. It makes leaving easier, even if it makes returning harder.

But nothing lasts forever, not even people. What will happen if the people who feel like home disappear, or something in me or them changes and they no longer feel like home? I suppose by that point, I’ll consider myself to be quite embattled, and I’ll be listening to an awful lot of Bob Dylan.

I can’t help but think about impermanence often, especially as it pertains to Buddhist teachings, because I find it simultaneously terrifying and comforting. One of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote:

“There is no way home

Home is the way”

Audre Lord, Bob Dylan, and Thich Nhat Hanh all pinpoint in different ways the nothingness and everythingness of home. And they have helped me realize that my evolving definitions of home share a common thread.

The snowflakes glimmering under the streetlamp, the sound of the snowplow, the blanket on my bed, the blanket on the airplane, the conversations in my friend’s room, the reclined movie theater seats filled by my family. Each of these things are not permanent; they exist right in the moment. Home is everywhere.

And I’m hopeful that even as the places and people I love appear and disappear and change, one thing will remain true: if home is everywhere, then perhaps home will always be within.