A distant song—
Not forgotten, just quieter now.
Like steam rising from a bowl of soup once served by familiar hands.
I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately. Not the bricks and wood kind, but the version that lives somewhere behind the ribs. The one that smells like something cooking in another room. The one that sounds like someone calling your name the way only they do. The one that disappears when you try too hard to return to it.
In Kobe, when I was twelve, my father told me that home was not a place, but a person. I didn’t understand what he meant until long after he was gone. Now I understand too well.
Sometimes I look around this apartment—the light catching the edge of a chipped ceramic cup, the steady hum of the refrigerator pretending to be silence—and I realize I’ve built a life out of fragments. Nothing fits perfectly. The couch doesn’t match the walls. The paintings are crooked. The spoons are all different sizes. But there’s something oddly comforting about it. Like the beauty of a cracked bowl, repaired with gold—more valuable now than when it was new.
That’s wabi-sabi, I think. The acceptance that nothing is permanent, nothing is perfect, and nothing is ever truly finished. Including us.
Loneliness Wears Many Faces
There are nights I scroll through endless rectangles of people I used to know. The glowing, pixelated versions of their joy. And I wonder: How many of them feel the same drift I do?
According to The Good Life, the longest scientific study on happiness, it isn’t wealth or success or even achievement that sustains us. It’s connection. The soft, invisible thread between two people who still make time for one another—even if only to ask how the soup turned out.
Loneliness is a thief. Quiet. Polite. It doesn’t break in, it seeps. And by the time you notice it, it has rearranged the furniture of your life.
But connection—like home—is something you can rebuild. Not all at once, but slowly. A call. A letter. A shared meal with someone who still laughs at your old jokes.
The Gentle Reminder
A good life isn’t made from perfection. It’s made from repair. From the small moments when someone shows up. When someone stays.
Even one of the study’s most isolated participants, found his way back into the world through something as ordinary as a gym. Not because he needed muscles, but because he needed people. At eighty, he laughed more than he had at forty. That gives me hope.
I used to think home was something behind me. A chapter closed. A photograph taken with film that can’t be reloaded.
Now, I wonder if it’s something I carry. Something I build, person by person. Maybe it’s not where you started, or even where you end. Maybe it’s who you love in between.
Lessons Etched in Quiet Places
- Your life is a story of connection. Nurture the characters that make it worth reading.
- Home is not behind you. It is beside you, being built in real time.
- Nothing is too late, and no one is too far gone. Not even you.
- Loneliness is real. But it is not permanent.
- Answer the phone. Make the tea. Sit down. Stay awhile.
And if you find yourself wondering where you belong…
Start with a name. Call them.
That might be home already.
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