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Sometimes you have to leave home to find it. And inevitably, you’ll lose it again. Perhaps you’ll go looking for the version from your childhood, complete with that squeaky bottom step and front yard treehouse your dad built. In that case, you’ll only find sadness, even if you find the same house on the same street and it comes close to how you remember it (though it usually doesn’t, because that home probably didn’t even exist as you remember when it actually existed). I must tell you–you would have found out eventually: time and distance have the tendency to shrink the mountainous hills you used to roll or sled down and named “Killer” and memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

But don’t worry, you’ll find home, if only for a moment. You’ll hear it in the lulling whirr of a working dishwasher, or the low-hum shuffle of early morning voices through paper-thin apartment walls. You’ll pass through some place that gives you that feeling, like an electric charge running from the ground up, a pull like gravity on the “N” on your compass, or the hard-to-fight drowning warmth of cold medicine as you doped-up drift to sleep. Other times, you’ll glimpse it in a person when they say a certain word or hold your hand a certain way. But be careful before planting a flag and staking claim in these traces of home (for illusions exist, the same as magic does). That is to say, mostly, you either carry it with you, or you don’t.

Maybe that’s all deja-vu is–brief, fleeting feelings of home. Maybe that’s why we can’t put a finger on it (or even words to describe it), the feeling no clearer than someone trying to recollect a dream long after the haze of waking has cleared and the sleep’s been wiped from bleary eyes.

The fact is, you could be made to feel at home or a million miles away, regardless of where a map (with its arbitrary circulatory system of roads and borders) says your location is. Sometimes, 5 miles can feel too far, depending on the people you’re missing down the road. And sometimes, even the next room can.

The point, (yes, you can fault me for rambling, but keep in mind that important points aren’t worth rushing) is that you’ll van Gogh-stumble through your share of alien terrain (from Holland to London to Paris to Holland to South France). You’ll try and abandon and try (from art dealer to teacher to minister to sketcher to painter) again. You’ll sacrifice your comfort for your passions (and sometimes your health for your vices). And the thought of what you should be doing will drive you in some strange directions, most notably, perhaps, walking nearly a hundred miles to seek the advice of someone you respect. And when you finally get there, bare-armed in the cold and pissing rain (as you stand outside the house of this person), it will occur to you that you knew the answer all along, and you’ll turn around. You’ll go home.

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