It was always easy to visualize a house as a kid–a shoddy hut with a single door and a single pathway abruptly ending in a grassy meadow. The structure of the hut did not seem to matter but the consistent appearance of grass, mountains, birds, and a sunset made evident the priorities of a five-year-old utopian spirit. Home, however, was better described by the image of a girl in a triangular dress standing between two grown-ups, a fragile family made of crayon lines holding each other close with their stick-figure hands. As one grows up, the triangular dress changes shape; it expands, tears away, and is eventually replaced. But we want the stick-figure hands to remain, to elongate as we crawl into another blank page, to hold us when we are alone in the void. Home is a place one can always go back to. 

You build yourself another home with every hand you stretch out in the direction of another stick figure. More sticks appear. Home is a mess, a spider’s web too familiar to poke with a broom. It is quite easy to take home for granted, to store things of significance in such secrecy that you forget where you kept them. When you are in an alien city, your loneliness extends and takes over the entire landscape, making the city itself lonely. The streetlights appear to stamp the stars out. The moon takes refuge behind the dregs of a building’s trivial history. You wish home was as tangible as the buildings that claim to contain it. You begin to see your own homelessness in the eyes of strangers. You travel from one point on the map to another, with the knowledge that your destination is in constant flux. 

In times when I find myself without a home, I float into outer space and watch my triangular dress tethered to the blueness I can no longer see on land. I have come to accept the surrounding emptiness. I have my moments of pretending to be Aleksey Leonov as I take an imagined walk into nothingness, suspended for what feels like an eternity. At the end of the day, or week, or month, or year, because who keeps time in space, despite the many homes I have left behind, another home always awaits me. Often, it is simply a yellow spot on an ivory sheet. Often, it is something to build my temporary world around.