I remember falling asleep in the back seat of my father’s car, opening my eyes sometimes to look up through the windows to find familiar.  If the lights were orange, we were still on the highway.  When the car slowed for a red light, I knew we were getting closer.  I’d keep my eyes closed and try to imagine where we were, exactly how far from the street, from the driveway.  After a few years, I learned the bends, the sounds, the difference in light, and I knew the motion of a turn onto our street.  My body knew I was home.  It knows the same thing now with you.

On overcast days colors seem brighter.  When impending doom ribbons through the air, everything seems more alive–love and fear.  Children leave home for boarding schools, in their navy sweaters and ripped jeans, to summer camp with headphones and a pillow for the bus, for foreign language trips to study abroad with tattered dictionaries filled with highlighted idioms.  Parents stand together in gray parking lots, a band of arms around torsos and shoulders, balled up tissues raised to absorb the saline as the bus rolls on.  Hands press against the glass bus windows, leaving behind a labyrinth of fingerprints, bittersweet, and miss.  I’m not leaving home now that I’ve found it.