I find myself tripping over the word “home” a lot – it always seems to catch on the tongue. There is a moment’s hesitancy, a split second pause between mind and lips. It’s a fluid thing this notion of “home”. When I am here, home is there. It is where I grew up, where my family waits, where my memories and heartstrings resonate, where the seasons match my moods, where I am in my element as a fish in water.

And when I am there, home is here. This is where my ambitions are rooted, where my daily life cycles and repeats, where I lift my head off the pillow in the optimism of new sun and lay it down again in weariness, where my husband and friends are present in presence, where my creature comforts reside, where my work and apartment and favourite cat are located, where my plans and dreams spring from.

Yet home is also neither of those places, for both are incomplete. *I* am incomplete. Wherever I am, I am longing for elsewhere, feeling the emptiness in me that no one place can fill. It is the hollow formed by absence of family and fall leaves, fragmented holidays and oceanic distances.

It’s a hollow that’s become a permanent part of me – and perhaps more than anything, that hollowness is the one constant in this transatlantic divide. “Home” seems to be, most simply, wherever I am not.

And I’m never where I want to be.

leona naess – home

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