Note I — A Stranger in Every Home

Notes from a Life I Was Not Promised — Note I

On exile, belonging, and the peculiar tragedy of having nowhere to return.

I have resided in many places, but I have lived in none. Perhaps one. Yes, perhaps one. But even that I am no longer certain of.

What an absurd thing to say! I have had addresses, beds, rooms, even houses. I have possessed keys to doors in cities whose names I once knew only from books. I have paid rent, arranged furniture, bought groceries, and performed all those ordinary rituals by which a man convinces himself that he belongs somewhere.

And yet, I am not certain that I have ever belonged.

I was twelve when I first left home.

Twelve! An age at which a boy ought to be concerned with school, childish quarrels, and the small injustices of growing up. At twelve, one should still be permitted the illusion that the world is permanent, that one’s parents will remain as they are, that the house in which one sleeps will always be waiting, unchanged, for one’s return.

But I left for military college.

I stayed there for three years.

I do not recall thinking of myself as an exile. Children, fortunately, are not always capable of understanding the full significance of what happens to them. They accept circumstances with a kind of innocence that adults later mistake for resilience.

I believed, as perhaps every child believes, that home was something fixed. That one could leave it, wander as far as necessary, and return to find everything precisely as it had been.

But home, I have since discovered, is not patient.

It does not wait.

While we are away, the people within it continue their lives. They eat meals without us. They laugh at jokes we never hear. They suffer disappointments of which we learn only afterward, if at all. They develop habits that do not include us, and gradually our absence ceases to be an interruption and becomes part of the ordinary arrangement of things.

There is no cruelty in this.

That is precisely what makes it cruel.

No one has betrayed us. No one has deliberately taken our place. The world has merely continued, as it must, and we have not been there to participate in it.

And so, when we return, we discover something almost impossible to articulate.

The house is familiar, but our place within it has become uncertain.

We recognize every room, but the rooms no longer seem to recognize us.

We know where everything belongs, except ourselves.

I left again during my first employment, for a shorter span of time. That separation lasted perhaps around a year. But there were people around me then, colleagues and companions, the familiar disorder of shared existence. I was away from home, certainly, but I was not entirely alone.

And now this is the third time I have been away from home, and the longest.

At first, I considered this a sign of progress. I had become independent. I could move between cities, establish myself in unfamiliar surroundings, and construct a life without depending upon the physical presence of those I had left behind.

And it was not only I who believed this. My mother and father, too, had come to trust in my ability to live away from home. After all, I had done it before. They had sent me away as a boy, and I had managed. I had left again as a young man, and I had managed then as well. Why should this time be any different?

But there is that word again. Lived.

Had I lived away from home, or had I merely learned how to reside elsewhere? Had I learned to live independently, or simply to endure the absence of those among whom living had once seemed natural?

Perhaps my parents were right to trust me. I could manage the practical arrangements of existence. I could find shelter, earn a living, feed myself, and navigate unfamiliar places. There was no reason for them to doubt it.

And yet, I wonder whether we had all mistaken the ability to manage for the ability to belong.

What an achievement, I thought!

A man who can live anywhere!

But lately I have begun to wonder whether the ability to live anywhere is not, in certain circumstances, the consequence of having ceased to belong anywhere.

For what does it mean to become accustomed to leaving?

At first, one leaves a place.

Then one leaves another.

Eventually, one begins to leave even before one has arrived.

One no longer fully commits oneself to the rooms one inhabits, the streets one walks, or the routines one develops. Somewhere in the mind remains the suspicion that all of this is temporary, that another departure is inevitable, that the present arrangement is merely an interval between two journeys.

And so one becomes a permanent guest in one’s own existence.

I have thought often about the word home.

It is such a small word, and yet I have come to distrust it.

What does it mean?

Is home the place where one was born? Surely not. A man cannot be expected to belong eternally to a geographical accident.

Is it the place where one’s family lives? Perhaps. But families change. Children become adults. Parents grow older. Relationships acquire distances that cannot always be measured in kilometres.

Is it the place where one keeps one’s belongings?

If so, I have a home.

Indeed, I have an entire house to myself.

Everything in it belongs to me, or at least is there because I have chosen it. I may arrange the furniture as I please. I may leave a book unfinished upon the table and find it undisturbed the following morning. No one questions my habits. No one interferes with my routines.

I possess the place completely.

And yet I cannot quite bring myself to call it home.

There is something missing from it, though I cannot point to a particular corner and say, There, that is where the absence resides.

The absence is everywhere and nowhere.

It is in the silence after I close the door.

It is in the absence of another person’s ordinary belongings.

It is in the knowledge that if I return an hour later than usual, the house will be exactly as indifferent to my arrival as it would have been an hour earlier.

But perhaps I am confusing home with companionship.

Perhaps these are separate things.

After all, one may live with others and remain a stranger. One may share a house with a family and feel entirely displaced. There are homes filled with voices in which no one is truly heard.

And there are people who live alone and possess a profound sense of belonging.

Why, then, should I insist that my solitude has deprived me of a home?

I do not know.

Perhaps because the home I remember was never merely a building.

It was a relationship between myself and the world.

A condition in which my presence was assumed rather than explained.

A place where I did not need to announce who I was, because the people around me already knew.

And here lies another difficulty.

The home I remember no longer exists.

Not because the building has disappeared, nor because the people have ceased to love me. But because the life that made it home has continued without me.

When I return, I am returning to a place that has acquired years of history in my absence.

And I, too, have changed.

The boy who left at twelve is gone.

The young man who left for work is gone.

Even the person who began this third departure is no longer entirely the person who now sits writing these words.

What, then, am I hoping to recover?

Perhaps I am searching for a place that exists only in memory.

And memory, that most affectionate of liars, has preserved it more faithfully than reality ever could.

It has kept the familiar voices at their former ages. It has preserved the warmth of rooms whose occupants have since changed. It has allowed me to imagine that somewhere, beyond the distance, there remains a version of life into which I may step again whenever I choose.

But I cannot.

No one can.

One may return to a house, but one cannot return to the time in which it was home.

And perhaps this is what makes growing older so quietly devastating.

We imagine that we are accumulating things: knowledge, experience, possessions, independence.

But we are also losing entire worlds.

Not suddenly, not dramatically, but through the ordinary passage of time.

A childhood home becomes a place to visit.

A familiar street becomes a memory.

A room in which we once belonged becomes a room in which we are welcomed.

And there is a difference between being welcomed and belonging.

A guest is welcomed.

A member of a home is expected.

I sometimes wonder whether I have become a guest everywhere.

In the place I left, I am the one who returns.

In the place I inhabit, I am the one who arrived.

In neither am I entirely free from the consciousness of having come from somewhere else.

And so I live between two absences.

One is the absence of the home I remember.

The other is the absence of the home I have not yet made.

I could, of course, choose to see this differently.

I could declare myself a citizen of the world. I could celebrate the freedom of belonging to no single place. I could say that home is wherever I happen to be, that roots are unnecessary, that the modern man must learn to carry his identity within himself.

These are attractive ideas.

I have believed some of them.

But I wonder whether they are always convictions, or whether they sometimes serve as consolations for what we have lost.

For a man may learn to survive without roots and still long for the earth.

He may become skilled at departure and still desire, secretly and shamefully, to remain.

And what is so shameful about that desire?

Why should the longing to belong be considered a weakness?

Perhaps because belonging requires something independence does not.

It requires us to admit that we are affected by others.

That our existence is not entirely self-sufficient.

That we need places and people to whom our presence matters.

And perhaps I have spent so long proving that I can live without these things that I have forgotten to ask whether I actually wish to.

Tonight, I shall return to my house.

I shall open the door with my own key, switch on the lights, and enter rooms arranged entirely according to my preferences.

Everything will be where I left it.

Nothing will have changed.

And perhaps that is what troubles me most.

For in the home I remember, things were always changing. Someone was speaking, moving, cooking, asking, complaining, laughing. Life was occurring independently of my will, and I was part of it.

Here, the house waits for me in perfect obedience.

It offers me everything except the experience of being expected.

And so I find myself in the peculiar position of a man who has traveled far, acquired independence, and built a life of his own, only to discover that the one thing he cannot arrange through effort is the feeling of having returned.

Perhaps one day I shall find it.

Perhaps I shall build it with someone.

Perhaps I shall discover that home was never something waiting behind me, but something still possible ahead.

Or perhaps I shall continue moving, carrying within me the memory of places to which I can return but no longer belong.

I do not know.

For now, I have a house.

I have a key.

I have somewhere to sleep.

And somewhere between the home I left and the home I have not yet found, I remain.

Still here.