Becoming Not Home

posted by Molly

The opposite of a place becoming home is a place becoming not-home. You know, when you finally move out of your parents’ house, and visits become visits, not home comings. When you return to a city you once lived in and the restaurants no longer seem familiar. When you grab coffee with an old friend and you sit in an awkward silence that you’ve never felt before. 

I’m thinking of my own visit back to Boston this December. It still very much feels like home to me, but many of my childhood friends don’t identify as Bostonians any more. They are New Yorkers, Californians, world travelers, and so on.

Change puts this process into motion, but what brings it to completion? Is it time and distance that disconnects us? Or the loss of the people that made a home?