When I left New York in the spring of 2023, I packed the last of my things into the car and stood in the middle of my tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, vacuum humming in my hand. It was the final step—cleaning the last traces of my existence from that space. As I shut off the vacuum and leaned it against the wall, I took a moment to look around, taking in every inch of that cramped, imperfect little first-floor flat in Boerum Hill. Two years of my life had played out there—studying, working, navigating a long-distance relationship, meeting new people, being sick, being lonely, being overjoyed. Late-night video calls, board games with friends, small gatherings that somehow felt expansive in a space so small. It had been musty and uncomfortable, unbearably hot in the summer, freezing in the winter. And I loved it. And I didn’t want to leave.
Maybe it wasn’t just the apartment. Maybe I didn’t want to leave New York. Maybe I didn’t want to leave school. Maybe I didn’t want to step out of that moment in time when everything was constantly in motion—whether that motion was exhilarating or exhausting, fulfilling or crushing. Balancing a full-time job, grad school, and just existing in New York City, which for many of us—especially those of us from rural places—is no easy feat. Getting to work, to class, drained every day, cramming into a packed subway car, the heat and bodies pressing up against me, the suffocating weight of having so many people around me all the time.
All of this was juxtaposed by the gratitude and warm memories I had of meeting for drinks with friends at the local bar after class. The bike rides with my cycling friends into the hills north of the city. The familiar faces—the baristas, the bartenders, the servers at restaurants, the grocery cashiers, the bodega deli cooks making breakfast sandwiches at dawn. The professors who challenged me, the service workers who kept campus running, the custodians clearing the halls after long nights, the security officers watching over us, the train conductors and transit workers who kept the city moving, the cab drivers and Uber drivers weaving through traffic. The museums, the jazz concerts, the rock shows, the street performers. The warm summer days at Prospect Park, smiling at the barbecues, hearing the layered voices and rhythms of languages from all over the world. The unmistakable hum of multiculturalism—a symphony of accents, laughter, music, and street chatter, blending into something uniquely New York.
I felt all of that. I felt what I was leaving behind.
I still think about that day. I have the pictures from that afternoon—the light coming in just right, the space echoing in a way it never had before. And then I think about what it must be like to return to Gaza or Ukraine. To be someone who was born and raised there, who once played in the streets, rode bikes with the neighborhood kids, built a life. To come back and find it reduced to rubble, erased. Their home—maybe gone. Their school, their hospital, their local market, the park where they laughed as a child—maybe gone. But the place itself, the physical ground beneath it all, is still their home. Because home isn’t just the building you occupied, the walls that held your things. It’s the streets, the trees, the way the air feels at dusk. It’s the smell of a bakery down the block, the rhythm of conversation in a language that feels like second nature. It’s all the things that can’t be moved, replaced, or rebuilt somewhere else.
When I go back to Brooklyn, or to Los Angeles where I spent a decade, or to Ohio where I grew up, I see the buildings, sure. The apartments I once lived in, the houses where I slept. But what I really see—the things that make a place home—are the sidewalks, the trees, the way the light hits at a certain time of day. I hear the birds, the voices, the particular hum of a place that can’t be replicated anywhere else. You can move, you can start over in new cities, but you can’t take that feeling with you. The culmination of memory, sound, scent, and sensation—it stays where it was formed. That’s what home is. That’s what home means.
