Do you not get homesick?" my boyfriend's mother asked me at the dinner table last evening. I'd been talking about the flexible nature of my freelance routine, how I have managed to afford for myself the luxury of being able to work from wherever I happened to me in any moment in time. "As long as I have a kitchen I can cook in, I'm happy," I told her. I was surprised by my answer. I hadn't thought about the notion of homesickness given that I've come to define myself as a domestic itinerant, someone who doesn't travel as much as temporarily inhabits spaces, investing them with traces of my being and belongings, so that elements of myself can always be recovered should I choose to track my way back by following the strategic trail of my bread-crumbed words.

Over the years, while my suitcases have acquired a more minimal sensibility in terms of their contents, I can confidently attest to how the weight of my emotional baggage has exponentially increased. We are conditioned to think of the phrase negatively, as if it embodied a situation that merited castigation. I could argue that it is in fact what mitigates the gut-wrenching absorptiveness of homesickness.