Home

I’m ready for home, however humble.

My siblings and I sang a song from childhood this weekend, a song itself about what is lost in childhood, called “My Home”. It asks what makes a place home, or an ancestral home. It’s elliptical, evocative, and hits home the question of origins, of where one is from, and whether one might also belong there.

It’s clear that New York’s not my home, a song they didn’t seem to know. Its lyrics half-capture New York’s anonymity, but half of its power lies in Croce’s tone of longing, which varies so little between his songs.

London feels like home to me now; could New York feel that way? From outward appearance it seems unlikely, though I can’t say why. But maybe in my first visits to London, I could not have conceptualised it as home either. And it no longer feels so stable a home as it once did.

It makes me want to find my writing from then, from 2006, when I first visited London as a tourist, to see what my impressions of the city were like.

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.