What We Call Home

Home is not a place. Or it is a place, but not only a place. The word does too much work.

I have lived in many places and called some of them home and not others, and I have been trying to understand what the difference is. It is not about how long you stay. I have lived somewhere for years and never felt at home, and I have felt at home somewhere within days. It is not about ownership. Some of the places I have felt most at home I have had the least claim to.

I think home is about being known. Not famous, not recognized — known. The particular knowledge that comes from being seen over time, in different moods and circumstances, by people who have no reason to see you favorably and choose to anyway.

This is why home is so often associated with family, even for people whose families are difficult. The family knows you in a way that no one else does — knows your history, your embarrassments, the person you were before you became the person you are. This knowledge can be a burden. It can also be a gift.

But family is not the only way to be known. I have felt at home in cities where I knew no one, because the city itself seemed to know me — seemed to offer, in its particular arrangement of streets and light and sound, something that matched something in me. This is probably projection. But projection is a form of recognition, too.

I have been thinking about what it would mean to feel at home in the world — not in a specific place, but in existence itself. To feel that you belong here, that your presence is not an accident or an imposition but something that fits.

I do not always feel this. But I feel it sometimes. In certain moments of attention, certain moments of connection, certain moments when the world seems to be exactly what it is and I seem to be exactly what I am and the two things are, briefly, in accord.

Those moments are what I mean when I say home.

They do not last. But they are real. And they are enough to keep looking for.