The town I live in is so far from everything that it is hard to believe anyone has ever ventured there, and, when I reflect in this way, it is harder still to imagine that I myself have succeeded in that journey, and made this place my home. Sometimes people ask me what happens, what I see, what I am, to others and to myself, in this place that I call home; but I do not manage to convince them of anything. As soon as I open my mouth, they look aside, as if what I have to say is not the answer they were looking for. And so I grow more and more lonely, and feel less and less satisfaction with my choice. At those times I realise that a home is nothing to be proud of, and that I am not the arbiter of its truth. Sometimes I am even the first to disown it, as if thereby I can free myself from the obligation to explain it, or give meaning to the things within it which I have never tried to understand. But, at the end of the day, those who question me go away to their own beds, while the town that I have disowned continues, without judgment, to stretch and empty itself in the moonlight about me. In the morning, all of us awaken and go our separate ways, so that sometimes I forget I have a home at all, until someone glances gravely at the ring on my finger, and I remember, like the smoke above a valley, that somewhere out of sight has put down roots and made a life of me that cannot be rescinded. Then I hang my head in shame and try to push my way through the doorway as quickly as possible. It’s spring outside; there’s a space between here and there; the promise of its distance is like the promise of a future; I can walk slowly; I can try to forget it, even though you can never really forget it, and when I breathe the scent of fallen blossom on the corner of the street, I want to set that smell aside, to push back the emotions it arouses into the past where they belong; for I remember with scalding love the wind-swept places I have come from, but can share nothing of my own with the destiny of the haven for which I am bound - that faraway place called home.