I got a pug at home who’s feeling lost because I’m out of town. Dogs are funny that way; you could put them on a cold planet in a distant galaxy, and as long as their person is with them, they’re okay. But confine them to a separate room in their own house? They fall to pieces.

Then there’s people. We tend to fall to pieces no matter where we are or who we’re with. When we’re away from home, we desperately want to get back, but once we’re there, the ache for something else sets in. Then we’re off to the next thing, which no longer requires leaving the house; we can send our brain to an ephemeral somewhere by scrolling and binging and munching Doritos.

Jerry Seinfeld says it best: “Nobody wants to be anywhere”

People say they want to go home. It’s written on the face of almost every weary traveler on the road or at the airport. There are thousands of songs and stories and movies written about it. I’m convinced people don’t actually know what home is. If we did, we wouldn’t be running around doing all sorts of strange and awful shit. We’d be there. We’d be resting. I wonder if home works the same way as many other things in life: it’s difficult, though uncomplicated.

Picture a man, middle-aged, disappointed with things, disappointed with himself. He sits alone in traffic, his sore back digging a hole in the driver’s seat of the car that worries him a little because of the chirping sound it makes as it idles. The man does not want to be here in traffic; he wants to be home. But there lies another nest of problems. A flu is lurking around the house and one of the kids is going through a “hate everything” phase, and the water heater is signaling it’s poised to retire from duty.

Imagine this man takes a break from the pessimistic murmur of talk radio and scans to a random music station. And there appears a song he hasn’t heard in many years. He knows the song as well as he knows the face of his first born—every note and word. And the man sings till his voice cracks; he drums the wheel, stamps his foot, the traffic no longer an obstacle, but a part of the story. The problems at the house are just circumstances, nothing more.
This moment, I believe the man is home.