Tomorrow, the day the media boasts as the ‘busiest travel day’ of the year, I’ll be heading South and visiting family in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m cautious with the word ‘home’, as it’s not my home: I never lived in this house, and I’ve spent more time in Chicago, for example, than in Florida at any point. I can’t be possessive of it as a place that has bore witness to me or my growth. There is no fort in the backyard with moss growing up it’s sides, chalk dust remnants from a summer spent decorating my fort, castle, or airplane—depending, really, on my mood and obsession of the moment. (As you might suspect, the airplane one has been harder to shake loose.) I won’t be heading down the street to play kickball on the concrete patch with green shoots lurching from the cracks. This is not where I oogled at crushes from afar, not where I watched fireworks with my parents on the 4th of July.

This is incredibly sore for me. I am without a place to call home, whatever that truly means. Florida is both a home for my parents, and an elixir, a space seemingly so contrasted with where we had come from that it was the antidote they needed to trudge ahead. And, I’ve come back, enjoyed my time with family in the scorch of a Florida afternoon, but never felt at ease at this place I first met in the awkwardness of pubescence. It was utility as described through the signs we saw on the road boasting “great schools!” and “great amenities!”. I did have a great school and undoubtedly, most states would be hard pressed to talk as casually about such luxurious living. Never before had I come to expect golf and tennis would be standard elements of the housing compounds my classmates and I lived in.

At the baggage claim in Fort Myers, Florida, my parents will be there, likely with the dog they purchased when I went away to college. My mother and I are reading a book together now, which is my feeble attempt to find slowness in our drifting lives that seem otherwise to never intersect. Home will be trapped not in place—for an individual who spends so much time thinking about the where—but in the people. From LaGuardia to Heathrow to O’Hare to Southwest Florida Regional, the baggage claim, I am coming to learn, is all the same.