The concept of home is needed (and in fact it can only be thought) only after the home has already been left behind. In a strict sense, then, one has always already left home, since home can only exist as such at the price of it being lost.
-- Van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. xviii-xix.
* * *
Indeed.
And to travel is a way of mitigating the pain, a way of coping with the loss of home by making the best of disorientation.
That is to say, I never leave any home behind: I merely travel from place to place, land to land. Everything, everywhere, everyone becomes thereby comfortably unfamiliar.
And I'm not afraid to face the truth -- which others call danger -- that, having become a foreigner in what I once called my own homeland, home will always be the place that I have lost, the place where I'm not.
The only space I can thus fully inhabit is the in-betweeness of displacement: 'between domains, between forms, between homes, between languages', as that quintessential traveller-theorist, Edward Said, phrased it.
There is no home and away, only something in between.
Yet I'm so immensely revitalised by these exilic energies, so energised by this border existence (which others call destitution).
I just can't live otherwise.
The journey continues, then.
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