Hallway and Home

In describing what comedian Sarah Silverman called homesickness, Johann Hari in his book Lost Connections writes

When we talk about home today, we mean just our four walls and (if we’re lucky) our nuclear family.
But that’s never been what home has meant to any humans before us. To them, it meant a community—a dense web of people all around us, a tribe. But that is largely gone. Our sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging. So we are homesick even when we are at home.

Reading this made me think of the ways I have experienced homesickness and none of it was while being away from the physical place I called home - at any point in my life. I used to attribute that feeling of rootless and unbelonging to the fact that we are a refugee family. Perhaps the answer is a bit different. What we are conditioned to think of as "home" does not meet our emotional definition of "home".

I have spent some of the coziest and at-homes times in the hallway of a small apartment with a constant flow of people coming in and out. A lot of chaos, not enough room for everyone's belongings, cooking meals whenever whoever had time for it. Guests were always welcome and they showed up with their bags and sheets and found a spot to be comfortable. The "homes" I have otherwise lived in bore no resemblance to this hallway that served as "home" sometimes and yet I cannot think of another place that fits my emotional needs so well.