Home is a hole I dug myself.

Synapses pinging like GPS: Lawrence, NY, where the cousins sit Shiva. Ping. Homer, Alaska, cousins praising Jesus for a fishing boat, unsunk. Ping. West Virginia, where a long dry season ends with thunder and coyotes. Ping. Florida. Dad, in brown dress shoes, stepping over a lizard on his way to work. Ping. My mom swims laps in Connecticut while my brother tests the reverb in Nashville and, in Baltimore, another cousin has a beer.

Home is all of these places. And home is not a single one.

Where I live now, the light shines sideways over pink water. Spotted geckos laugh at my jokes. I buy my produce from a friend's garden, so lilikoi and pepino melons flavor my mornings sweet. The night clouds clear, and the stars peer out, dust-spattered, from behind bright constellations. But it's not my sky to keep.

I live on stolen land.

When my dog saw his first rabbit, his tail fired at a diagonal, his spine stiffened, and his paw froze in mid-air. His every whisker knew that This. Was. His. Moment. despite living his first seven years completely and totally rabbit-free. When the eruption started and the earth was shaking, this very same dog dug a hole and buried himself alive in a shallow grave. He did it out of instinct, fear, and some primal urge to die in the dignified quiet.

I hadn't met him yet. The grave was only temporary.

Sometimes, during the rainy season, the roaches grow bold, the leather turns moldy, the walls sprout blacker-than-normal fungus, and the power goes out (along with the WIFI). The nearest cell service is 15 miles away on a sunny day. So I’m alone with the roaches and the rain and the mold and the quiet and the dog and the thousands and thousands of miles of open ocean. And that’s when I start to wonder if maybe a sea view and an avocado tree aren’t everything.

But where else would I go?

In Spain, they pronounce WIFI “wiffy”. In Ireland, the beer is made with fish. In Singapore, every sentence ends with “lah”. In Hong Kong, the trams are thinner than an arm’s breadth. In Argentina, the doors catch and lock you inside. Once upon a place, my friend’s mom dropped her chicken-in-a-bag in the ocean. She was a child. You can go and sit on the side of the highway in Nassau, legs dangling, in that very spot where she watched the chicken fall. Drop. Splash. Sigh. At least, twenty years ago you could sit there still.

I sat there, twenty years ago.

When I was a kid, getting out of Florida seemed like the most important thing. I assumed home would always be there, floating at sea level, waiting for me to return and cast off again whenever I pleased. I didn’t realize that the state was sinking. Nobody mentioned how the swamp would reclaim what we had built. I had time, I thought, to see the sights and meet the people and chase the rabbits and make it back before dark.

That's not how it works, though, is it?

Nobody told me that the shorelines are not drawn to scale. The roadways are all crisscrossing lines, mapped in cytoplasm, written in bone. The trail markers are heavy metals and parasites and scar tissue and pain. Ping. The island is six hours behind. Or five. Or four. Or three, for California, where my aunt has lost her twin. It’s late here, so my family is sleeping. It’s morning, so my family is up. That calculation charts a vast internal landscape. It's my metronome, my compass, my north star, my southern cross.

It’s my 6’ x 3’ hole—the one I dug myself.