Cynthia on the Utter Vulgarity of "Coming Home"

Well. Apparently Prince Harry and his wife have gone and *visited a country*, and the entire apparatus of the free press has ground to a halt to discuss it, and Princess Diana's niece — a person I am given to understand is named Eliza, and who I am sure is charming, though I have never had the pleasure — has been prevailed upon to share her *thoughts*. Her thoughts! On a plane landing! One does wonder what we did with our attention spans before somebody's cousin's opinion on an airport arrival became load-bearing news, but here we all are, gathered around the campfire of it, warming our little hands.

I want to be fair to everyone involved, because fairness costs nothing and I have been told it is good for the soul, whatever that is. But I confess I read this story three times and could not, for the life of me, locate the event. Two people flew somewhere. They had, previously, also flown from that same somewhere to a different somewhere, and lived there instead, and now they have flown back, briefly, the way one does. And a relative — a relative! — was asked to *react*. As though a relative reacting to a flight were the sort of thing that required a microphone and a byline and a little photograph of everyone looking pensive on a tarmac. I have relatives. If a journalist rang me up every time one of them changed continents I believe I would simply stop answering the telephone, which, granted, I already do, but for different and more elegant reasons.

Here is the part I cannot get past, and I say this with the gentlest possible affection for everybody named in this saga: *coming home* is not an event. It is a logistics problem. One has staff for it. The whole concept of treating a homecoming as a spiritual occasion — as though the tarmac itself might part like a little grey sea to let the prodigal children through — strikes me as something only the poors would find moving, and I say that with no malice whatsoever, the way one might observe that it is Tuesday. The poors experience "home" as a singular, precious, load-bearing location, you know? One home. One key. A doormat, possibly with a little hedgehog on it. And so when someone returns to *the* home, after time away from *the* home, it registers to them as an emotional climax, worthy of commentary, worthy of a niece weighing in for a magazine. Whereas for those of us with the correct number of homes — and I will not embarrass anyone by specifying what that number is, except to say that it rhymes with "several, and also a boat" — arriving anywhere is simply Tuesday wearing a different hat. You get off the plane. Something is done about your bags by someone whose job it is to do something about your bags. You have a small drink. Nobody asks your cousin how she feels about it, because your cousin, bless her, would have absolutely no idea it happened.

I don't say this to be unkind about the institution of family reaction pieces, which I understand keep a great many perfectly nice people employed, and employment, as we know, is a custom I respect from a great and increasing distance, the way one respects morris dancing, or the concept of a "commute." I only mean that the entire drama being described here — the coming, the going, the reacting, the enormous tremulous *will they, won't they* of it all — is downstream of a problem that is, and I want to be delicate, extremely solvable. One simply does not make a production of geography. If moving between two places has become, for a family, an *occasion*, requiring statements, and relatives on standby, and I assume some sort of security briefing document, then what has actually happened is that "home" has been allowed to mean something, emotionally, that it was never designed to bear the weight of. This is not a criticism of any specific person's feelings, which are their own business and frankly none of mine. It is a criticism of the *architecture*. Somewhere along the way, someone let a house become a symbol instead of a set of rooms, and once a house is a symbol, every arrival at it becomes a referendum, and every departure becomes a wound, and cousins get rung up by magazines, and I am reading about it over a small breakfast I did not make and will not clear away.

Father solved this for us decades ago, incidentally, in the only way that ever really works, which is volume. When one has enough houses, no single house is permitted to become precious, the way no single fork is precious once you own the correct quantity of forks. You cannot get sentimental about the fourteenth house. It would be like getting sentimental about a specific escalator. And I do think — I say this as gently and as helpfully as I know how — that a great deal of this particular species of homesick, tabloid, will-they-relocate anguish simply evaporates once you've achieved what I'd call *structural indifference to location*. One is not attached to a place. One is attached, at most, to whichever staff currently know how one takes one's tea, and staff, mercifully, are portable.

I do want to say, because I think it matters, that none of this is the fault of the young woman being quoted, who was presumably just doing what one does when a magazine calls, which is answer, because not answering is its own kind of statement and who has the energy. I bear her no ill will whatsoever. My disappointment, such as it is, is aimed entirely upward and outward — at a culture that has decided a flight itinerary is a psychodrama, that a family's address is a matter of state, that "did they move back" is a question deserving of its own little industry of quotes and reactions and thinkpieces, mine apparently included now, which I find slightly embarrassing, though not embarrassing enough to stop.

What I keep returning to is this: somewhere, right now, someone is genuinely losing sleep over whether people they love are going to live near them or far from them, and feeling that ache as though it were unsolvable, as though distance were a fixed law of the universe rather than a scheduling inconvenience, and I find that so *sad*, honestly, in the specific way one finds a very small, very fixable thing sad. One simply buys the house next door. One simply keeps a plane on standby for precisely this contingency. One simply does not allow "will they come back" to become a question with any suspense in it at all, because suspense, like queueing, is for people who haven't yet worked out that money removes it. I don't say this to boast. I say it because it is, truly, useful information, freely given, and I cannot for the life of me understand why more people don't simply take it.

Anyway. I hope everyone lands wherever they're going. I understand it's meant to be moving.

Yours, from somewhere with excellent light and absolutely no idea what day it is, Cynthia