Home is wherever I’m with you.

I want to go home.

Home is where the heart is.

You can’t go home again.

Look Homeward Angel

You get the point.

It’s a loaded word for so many of us, conjuring images of joy or anxiety; family or a war zone. And probably most of the time, a mixture of them all.

Nine months ago today I moved out of the house where my family had lived for nine years, the longest we’d ever lived anywhere. It’s the house where we had sleepovers and high school graduation parties, guests sleeping in every bed and sofa, holidays and hangovers. It was the house people left to go off to college and the house to which they returned, our group dynamic never again the same. It’s the house where our family came apart, shattered into pieces in a way that ensured it would never go back together the same way. It’s the house where I learned to mostly let go of the haunting sorrow of that knowledge.

I’m on a journey now. I had a thought that grew into an idea, that grew into emails and Kickstarters and people having faith in me when, let me assure you, I did not have faith in myself. At a certain point when I could see that it was going to succeed, I actually thought, “Holy crap I have to do this now.”

There’s a scene in the movie Wild, which is based on the awesome book by Cheryl Strayed, where a guy asks Reese Witherspoon, “You ever think about quittin’?” to which she responds, “Only every 2-3 minutes or so.” That’s how I’ve felt, as I got ready to leave, as I drove away, as I found myself clinging to the last shreds of home—our city’s miraculous baseball team, Boulevard beer, my PO Box at the Westport Post Office, and my amazing friends.

I don’t know what my next home looks like. But for some inexplicable reason, I believe it’s somewhere in this journey. So for at least two or three more minutes, I’m hanging in there.