Smiling In Your Sleep (or, “The Sensation of Home”)

The plane is low enough that the city lights wink on outside the little airplane windows. It’s after midnight, that time of night when the sky is black and deep enough that it stops seeming like space and starts seeming like time. Washington DC sleeps out there across the dark gash of the Potomac. The empty, curving streets lined with warm street lamps lay themselves out in familiar lines and loops. It’s the sensation of home, like someone coming so close to touching you that your skin believes they did. Sometimes your skin lies.

I am just a staccato presence here, punching in through the leaves and tree trunks and concrete and glass for a few weeks, a few months, then punching back out into that big blue sky again. Soaring somewhere new. Rummaging around for home.

Mada’in Saleh, Saudi Arabia; 2014

The next morning dawns the color of autumn. I’ve lived here enough that I know this color. The sensation of home. Shuddering leaves are the shade of cool honey, square flagstone houses raised up on their haunches all brick red and bright. They clash against a sky that only gets like this a few days out of the year. Blue so deep you fall into it and it takes conscious effort to pull yourself out again. Blue so deep you feel it on your face. Sometimes your skin tells the truth.

Bushkill, New Jersey; 2014

A Nigerian Uber driver tells me about his kids scattered across the northern hemisphere. He talks about them with a hitch in his steady, sure voice, like it’s tripping over holes. He drops me at a trailhead in suburban Maryland with a Christian blessing he pulled from some place inside him full of hope and God and holes. In his voice I hear the shape of all those things. It sounds like home.

Later, an Iranian Uber driver talks to me about his sisters back in Iran. I can see them in the way the deep 4 o’ clock sunshine settles on the high ridge of his nose, in the way he blinks at it so hard his eyes glisten, in the way his teeth turn inward a little, like they’re missing somebody. He drops me back at my hotel downtown with an Islamic prayer made of faith and fear that stretches all the way from here to home.

Damascus, Syria; 2004

I ride an empty afternoon subway car with a homeless man. There’s only the two of us. I’m standing, he’s sitting. I watch him. He’s got his eyes closed. He sways in time with the tunnel’s turns, anticipating each one. Like this is a dream he dreams all the time. Maybe his mother is there, perfect and straight. His hand rests on the seat beside him, palm up, fingers curled like they’re holding someone’s hand. The corners of his mouth twitch. He’s smiling in his sleep. Maybe he’s home.