Here is something I know about home: it can happen anywhere.
I’m lucky, because I knew that before we started traveling. It’s the benefit of having lived through a parent who moved to a separate state, and of having gone to college on the other side of the country from either of the places I called home as a teenager. I’ve spent my twenties feeling homesick on home turf, and I know that feeling like you belong somewhere does not mean you belong nowhere else.
I’m lucky, because I once felt myself unfurl and spread out, my breathing slow, and my heart unclench, just like I had come home, but instead, I was in a small northern Thai town where I spoke zero words of the language and stuck out like a sweaty lank-haired pink-skinned thumb. (It was 2016; Obama was still president; I had just come back from backpacking in the desert for a month and had flown almost straight to Thailand where my work, my sense of personal direction, and my relationship all seemed to be at risk of imploding. Nothing was stable, but damn did Chiang Mai feel like slipping into somewhere warm and familiar, a sweet-scented amniotic cocoon where I could recharge.)
And I’m lucky, because this fall, with Sam, Chiang Mai and I got to pick up where we left off.
Landing at the airport after waking up in Delhi and spending the day crisscrossing Southeast Asia, I was nervous – that Chiang Mai wouldn’t be what I remembered it to be for either of us (Sam, too, was nursing memories of being at home there: a similar relief. Discombobulated and wild, on a gap year before college, he came to Thailand looking for something new. When I met him, he was still tan from being burned in the Thai sun; he often showed up at my dorm apartment with handfuls of chilies and cilantro for soup.).
We needn’t have worried.
We burst out into the sweet wet night and spent the next days filling ourselves up with the air, which carries flowers and ginger and jackfruit along with it. The sounds, of laughter and calling street cats, of massage massage, of hot oil hitting pans in carts along the twisting tropical alleys. I will not torture you with descriptions of the food, but I will say that if you’re reading this from anywhere other than Thailand, you’ve never had Thai food. I’m sorry. I wish more than anything that wasn’t the case. I will spend the years until I can go there again trying to replicate things we ate and failing. You’re invited for dinner.
We spent days sweating rivers down inside our (fuck we are so sick of them) familiar, and increasingly ratty, clothes – clean sweat, the consequence of stubbornly eating hot as lava noodle soups in the heat of the day. We hid from midday sun in smoky restaurants that were hotter than outside, and in the shade of temple courtyards. Everywhere in Chiang Mai is beautiful, and a little weird: there is the sense that people care about their surroundings, but there are no rules; it is almost homemade; it is quirky; and, like so many places I have gotten to call home, there is room for you. There is room for me there. There was room, I was relieved to find, for us: for both of the people Sam and I had become since we had last been there.
Home can be anywhere, can’t it? It can be in a childhood bedroom. It can be in a café you frequented in college. It can be in the comfort of your routine, no matter where you are: the arranging of small things on a nightstand, so when you wake up, drowsy in the unnamed hours in yet another country, you know you have water, chapstick, telephone, there.
And if you find yourself walking, in the blistering midday sun, with tuk tuk drivers calling on one side of you and a slow river twisting on the other, with the post-monsoon cockroaches skittering away in front of you, with fruit stands in technicolor bursting all around you and, there, in the far end of the courtyard, music in a foreign tongue blasting in metallic waves: home can be there, too.
