Row 14 is an Exit row, a hotly coveted spot with a few extra inches of legroom on this mislabeled ‘regional jet’. In recent years, the jet and I have been on a national tour, and ‘region’ becomes far more muddled in the subtle moves from Florida palms to the grayness of New York—a haughty weightiness that let all know they were in a city of global consequence. But, I digress, and today, Row 14 is my spot in said jet on the jaunt to Louisville, where I spend much of my work week, working as it turns out, in a city fastidiously committed to play. Leaving on the weekends to play in those bleakly frenetic cities up North, clearly I had missed the point of Kentucky living.

I woke up this morning at 5:00 in my parents’ home, in an enclave tucked somewhere between Fort Myers and Naples—and with a hodgepodge of Italian, Spanish, Greek, influences stirring with an American lust for comfort and luxury, it was both everywhere and nowhere all at once. My bed was like I had seen in those catalogues, replete with those mountains of pillows—all various shapes and sizes. Every time I see them all tossed there, it makes me think of a pile of gumdrops I could splay my limbs across, picking them off as I got hungry.

Beating the church rush in to my favorite brunch spot this morning back in Louisville—yes, many people were in fact likely still sleeping as I had crumpled geography like a ball of scribbled notes. There was, of course, a brief foray in to the carnival that is Atlanta-Hartsfield, a noisy mess of trinkets and stimuli. My first plane was continuing on to Aruba, and after letting my mind wander for a moment about what my life would look like in Aruba right now, I plunge into the terrazzo maze and find my next gate. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution replaced the Fort Myers News-Press in the hands of business travelers and addled dads, looking for a nugget of escapism from their holiday travels, in the day’s news.

A dash to the next gate. Row 14. An exit row. Wheels up, seat back—lulled in to a sleep with the steady hum of jet engines. I awoke less than two hours later in Louisville. “Good morning”, the friendly voice billowed overhead. As I caught glimpse of the lineup of UPS planes (Louisville maintains an impressive hub for the parcel carrier), I knew in fact we were back. “How did this happen?”, I thought. It all just seems so unnatural and yet wonderful.  Liberating if not incredibly confusing.

I may be an avid flier, and a frequent one at that, but I never get too old, too frequent, too hardened in ways to not notice the wonderfully bizarre fact of it all: I woke up in Florida, sat in a steel tube for three hours, and now I am in Kentucky.

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.