The best definition of
home: “Home is where your device automatically picks up internet”.
The other day, after a
strenuous train journey I posted on Facebook: “So good to be home”.
Yesterday, a student greeted me: “I thought you had gone home... to
Sweden”.
After five years, people
keep asking me whether I had been home over summer. Yes, I say, I
stayed at home all summer, I have such a beautiful garden, and the
weather in Cambridge has been perfect.
People ask me whether I
plan to move home when I retire. I don't think they mean old people's
home.
I am going to Sweden next
week, but I am not going home. I am going away. My device will not pick up internet
automatically, I'll have to get a password. People assume that we
have kept a place to return to, but why would we? We don't even know
whether we will return. Does this reaction imply that most people
don't burn their bridges? That most people can point to a place on a
map, real or imaginary, and say with confidence: this is my home. Or
rather: this is where I come from, which is not the same. I envy
them. I cannot even go a generation back to say: this is where I come
from.
I define home
egocentrically, in an embodied present tense.
