I don't know where I live, or where I'm from. I mean it. I'm in the United States for "home leave," as they call it in the Foreign Service, which is really "homeless leave." "Home leave" occurs after you complete an assignment in one location and before you start a new one somewhere else. It's a time to catch up with friends and family, to get back together with the United States, and to wonder what they mean when they call it home.
I own a house in a town where two of my children were born, but five twenty-something females rent it out, and it smells like girl. I remember how my kids swung in the tree swing out back beneath boughs exploding white with cherry blossoms, and how we took our evening meals in the soft gold of evening sunlight spilling through the front window. We've got the deed to the house in a file somewhere, and it stakes us to this plot of land, to these walls. If home is what you own, then this is the place. But I was installing a new doorknob in the front door a couple weeks ago, and one of the tenants loped by in her pajamas, and that's when I knew this isn't home. Home doesn't smell like body lotion and facial cleanser.
There is a town, and I was born and raised there, and it's the color of sunburnt hay. It was home, and sometimes I go there and I drive around, and I still know all the curves of the streets, the way the shadows fall as the afternoon deepens, the big trees and how they sway, the smell of the wind. If home is a memory, then this is the place. But I guess home is more than that, because I'm a stranger in this town, I can feel it in the way the town flows around me. It doesn't flow through me anymore.
My parents live in a different city. They moved into their house the year after I left for college. It used to be blue, but now it's green. I brought a girl to this house one night a long time ago. She said hi to my parents, and then we stood on the deck in the warm summer twilight and watched the airplanes line up along the horizon to come in to land. I don't remember what we talked about, or what she looked like. But I remember the tongues of indigo and violet and salmon fire licking at the edges of the deep navy sky, and I remember feeling infinite, like the universe was pinned to our heartbeats and the stars served no purpose but to spotlight us, like nothing else and no one else existed, or ever had. If home is where you fall in love, then this is the place.
But the girl evaporated somehow, sometime, floated off. And other people blinked into existence, like my lovely wife, and then, one by one, my precious children. And I don't know for certain why there are stars, but I know they shine on both the lucky and the lonely. And I know the universe cares nothing for my heartbeat, but I know there are people who do. And I guess maybe home is in those heartbeats, and the way they thump in time with mine. Yes, that's probably right.