Shall we take the long way home?

Last week I travelled home. Or at least that is what the journey was called.

The word home appeared naturally in conversation over the past couple of months - tickets booked, messages exchanged, someone asking, “When are you going home?”, as if the answer were obvious, as if the place itself held a clear meaning. I nodded along, though the word felt strangely weightless in my mouth.

Where is home, exactly?

It certainly used to be a place once: a particular street, a bedroom window, the smell of flowers in the garden. But time loosens such anchors. Places change. People disappear. The self that once belonged there dissolves unnoticed and is replaced by someone else.

Returning becomes a truly peculiar experience. One walks through familiar rooms with the sensation of recognising everything and fully belonging nowhere...

The journey itself was gentle. Fields moved past the car window, mixed winter and spring light spreading thinly over the land, towns appearing and vanishing again. My body moving forward while the mind drifted backward.

I kept thinking about how we rarely overcome the great losses of life. Instead, we absorb them. They settle somewhere inside us and begin their slow work, carving us into someone kinder, softer - if we hope one day to become wise. Hopefully, they leave us a little more careful with other people’s hearts.

As I think of this, grief drips quietly from the walls of my heart. Yearning curls somewhere in the corner, fragile and insistent, like a newborn creature that has not yet learned how to rest. Old hopes flicker. Old wounds open and close like the keys of the flute I used to play in my childhood. And yet, something else stands beside all of it.

A willingness to bear it all. A sweet, gentle hope encouraging the breath to continue, even when each breath seems to pierce the heart.

Perhaps that is home?

Not a place, not even a country or a language. Just a small corner of the soul that somehow remains in order no matter what passes through it.

Home may also be a direction -something one approaches again and again without ever fully arriving. Something assembled slowly from memories, from tenderness, from the strange resilience of the human heart.

Maybe that is why, whenever life offers a choice between the straight road and the longer one, some instinct leans toward the longer path.

The longer road allows space - for the places we loved, the people we lost, the selves we once were and the ones we slowly became.

To take the long way home is to walk beside all of it - no rushing, no turning away - and still continue forward.