Nomadic Aesthetic

I think often of home. Not my literal home as in my apartment, although that's where I feel mostly comfortable. Mostly comfortable except for the gashes and gaping holes that appear when I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder where I am. These are abscesses that are deep inside me, which act up now again like a bad tooth. I am harboring bacteria in there. The holes that go down and out into nowhere, inside which I float like an unthethered astronaut in stark, elegant white against stark elegant black of the universe. And by home neither do I mean where my mother lives, three time zones away, where I did some of my growing up, both literally in her womb and surrounding environs. Where I got into trouble and got good grades, and from where I was on a singular, burning, mad woman's road to get out of. I visit this home and see it as nostalgia and simplicity, but only from this vantage point. By home, I also don't mean exactly, "where I'm from," which strangers ask constantly, cavalierly, as if this was an obvious question for which there would be an obvious, stupidly clear answer. "Where are you from?" California. "No, but where are you really from? FROM, from?" Being that I don't look like Sally Whitelady, people are always thinking it's alright to ask this question. The answer is, I don't know because where I was born is not at all where I consider I am from. And this isn't simply about political correctness--I really don't know and it's the source of my existential discomfort.

I think of home often because I live alone, have lived alone for my entire adult life partly because the choices I have made, from the miniscule to the majuscule, have made being solitary the best solution for this narrow, winding path. What is home? I find myself searching for it constantly.