This reminds me of home.

A place is just a place until it’s home but home is a concept filled with more than places. The Japanese have a word for the elusive feeling of where we are from, furusato. Your hometown. Your birthplace. Where you go to pay respects to your ancestors. A connection to place. 

There’s a deeper grief we run from in the loss of home. This elusive feeling there is more to our surroundings. I find it humming in the pit of my stomach when the landscape reflects like a mirrored trick, the rockpools of my memory, when a shift of light catches me in pre-dawn slumber and reminds where I’m from. A knot in my throat when I remember I’m not.

This song reminds me of home.

Amelia Barr says all change is more or less “tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving is part of ourselves.” I wonder if the grief is for place or myself. An itinerant version I would have preferred not to leave behind. Furusato encompasses the idea that home made you who are and I get tangled in the ideas of who I am or was or should be. 

I’m here and I’m me, so how I can feel the loss for where I am. Or was.

This smell reminds me of home.

A second furusato, the expression says we can have more than one. A place where your heart feels at home. You give to it and it gives to you. I dig into the grief and attempt to pull from it, what I might have to give. I tug at the words and place them, one by one, side by side.

They fall in line but don’t measure up and in despair, I fall into a trap of my own making.

This is

not the

place.