home (less)

     We’re in the first of several temporary homes after leaving our apartment. I can’t disclose the location, but this gal is one of the other residents.

     Mary used the metaphor of being in the witness protection program; she also used the word “vagabond.” I related the story of the time I showed up in the Prague train station at night without a place to stay in town. This was pre-internet and not long after the wall came down so there was not much infrastructure in that time or place for quickly finding a place to sleep. Luckily, a person on the platform was brokering apartments and had one that needed two residents. Another traveler who had just arrived looked at me and shrugged, and we were roommates for nearly a week in Prague.

     I said, I saw then how easily I could become homeless. I was homeless or felt homeless in that instant of realizing that I had not made sleeping arrangements. But when I said I was homeless then, the other residents objected. The true homeless, they suggested, are resource-challenged, interaction-shy, or have other situations that I did not have in that brief moment of my “homelessness.”

     But I do know it feels new, and vulnerable, and unmoored, to think of myself not having an address. A home. A base. A place to go back to. But I do have places to go forward to. And for that I am thankful. A series of temporary homes amid the foreign landscapes and cultures of those welcoming into those homes, however briefly. So rather than homeless, maybe we are homefull.