Not Quite the Final Destination
What a strange thing to wake up thinking you’re in another place. How travel can, with time, engrain in you a sense of home, a permanence about space that stays in your mind, becomes a part of your senses in such a way that even if the place is not your final destination, it feels like it is, or was. Having two homes to me means this: to feel a pull like tide between these two places. I come to my Georgia-home-I’ve-created and, especially at night when I dream, suddenly think I hear my father rummaging downstairs, or my mother turning open the blinds, and if I’m really straining, smell that brine from the sea on the breeze. My senses are really into it this year, drawing me into a deeper contemplation about the reality of home as much as its feeling. There’s meaning to it— something so life-defining it’s difficult to overlook or ignore—and it causes in me a desire to meditate on how home-space, in its flexibility as I get older and modernity digs deeper, is...