The Port We Cannot Find

The question came at the fourth dinner in the fourth new place, which was an apartment in a city Léa had not chosen and was not yet sure about. She was nine. The apartment smelled of the previous tenants in a way she could not describe except that it was not their smell, which meant it was not yet home, which meant it was a place she was staying rather than a place she lived. She knew this distinction because she had learned it three apartments ago.

She asked her father when they would be home. He was halfway through passing the salad and he stopped, and he looked at her with the expression of someone who had been asked a question they had been trying to answer for some time. Her mother looked at him. The question stayed in the room.

Her father said: "I don't know." This was the truest thing he could have said and Léa knew it was the truest thing even though she had hoped for a different answer. He said: "I think maybe home isn't a place we find. I think maybe we carry it." She asked what that meant. He looked around the apartment — at the boxes still unpacked in the corner, at her drawing stuck to the wall with the same piece of tape that had held up a drawing in three previous apartments, at the pot on the stove that was their pot, their smell, their dinner. He said: "I think home might be us. The four of us. Wherever we are."

She did not entirely believe this. She thought home was also a bedroom you had lived in long enough to know where the shadows fell at night, a street you could navigate without thinking, a neighbour whose name you knew. She thought home was also a place, not just people. She said so. Her father nodded. He said she was right. He said both things were true at once, which was the only honest answer even if it wasn't the simple one.

After dinner she put another drawing on the wall. She used the same piece of tape she always used, a little less sticky now but still holding. She stood back and looked at it. It was her drawing, in their apartment, in their city. It was not home yet. It was something in the process of becoming home, which she was beginning to understand was what home always was — not a destination but a direction.