I’ve often said the most painful thing a writer can experience is an inability to find the words… and I’ve never been as tongue-tied as I’ve been these last few months. I returned to Georgia to celebrate my birthday in March, and well, the leaves are changing colors and I’m still here.
My birthday seven months ago also marked two full years of life in New York City. The date proves time truly is a construct because those years feel like yesterday, a decade, and lifetime of rent all rolled into one. In some ways I miss it and in others I’m grateful to finally fall sleep and spend time away from the city that never does.
Since COVID upended all of our lives earlier this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about home and whether it, like time, is a construct too.
Thinking about “home” is a bit of a classic melancholic introvert pastime. Somewhat embarrassingly, my first blog was called “inconsolable longing” and—rooted in Tolkien’s lore and Lewis’s words—was largely about how humans are destined to be hopeless wanderers until called into an eternal home.
Fortunately, I’ve had several therapists since then and subsequently left the sad Tumblr blog of a worldview and early 2000’s angst behind. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that home is, as James Baldwin found, not a geographical location but rather an “irrevocable condition.” Home is both within and without us—something deeply connected to who we are and yet simultaneously a longing we all carry with us.
“Home” for me, was never the noisy, overpriced three bedroom I shared above Pam Thai at the corner of 49th & 9th, nor the Bushwick apartment misleadingly far from the JMZ, and definitely not the bedroom with two twin beds I shared in East Flatbush on the way to Canarsie.
If New York City was ever “home” it was home because of the buskers in McCarren Park that seemed to play just for me; listening to the Central Park horses make their way home late at night; the warm familiar glow of Tuesday nights at the Grey Dog in Chelsea. It was walking in the snow and feeling more at home in the freckled constellation on the face of the tattooed boy from Queens than the part of Brooklyn where they don’t plow the streets.
Merriam Webster might not agree but I think “home” and “meaning” are synonymous. Because, when we find home, we discover—if only for that moment—our lives have meaning too. In that sense, I suppose, home isn’t our return address, but the totality of authentic experiences where we feel known.
A light left on, always generous, warm, and sincere, we find home somewhere between hurting and healing.
And maybe that’s why we’re here. To lead one another home.