Conversations that feel like Home
the soul-nourishing, miraculous kind
“You feel like home, and everywhere I’ve never been, all at once”
—butterflies rising
They start innocently enough.
You make eye contact with a stranger and offer them a polite Hello. They respond in kind and you sit down. Small talk begins.
Then, after some Yes’s and No’s, a couple What’s, and a few How’s, something starts to happen.
You recognize a peculiarity in their choice of words or some idiosyncrasy strikes you as familiar, and something intangible about the other person starts to cohere. Some part of the Language of This Person becomes legible to you, and it catches you by surprise.
Almost cheekily, you throw out some obscure shade of meaning. To your astonishment, they pick up on it.
And though it makes no sense when put in words, you begin to feel a resonance in your psychologies, like putting on someone else's glasses for fun and finding your world still clear, like two radios tuned to the same frequency.
Somehow, it feels deeper than simply matching opinions and perspectives. It’s like crossing the ocean and finding that the birds here sing the same song as in your homeland. There is wonder and marvel.
And now it seems to you that you’re no longer in the same place as before. The other person is a stranger but also your confidante. You’ve not moved from your seat, but somehow, you’ve arrived.
And you remember, that home isn’t a place, it’s a person.
These are the conversations that spend mere moments whirring about within the orbit of something mundane before reaching escape velocity and jetting off towards distant nebulae. Like books, these conversations are wormholes into another dimension—somebody else’s life.
These are the conversations that feel like a shared miracle, the ones which you remember as revelations. For a moment, you escape the prison of self to vicariously glimpse the world through borrowed eyes.
They make you feel seen, and it bubbles out of you through rapid head nods, knowing smiles, and the breathless, involuntary elation at such stunning communion.
These conversations are carried by the words unsaid. Volumes are shouted in the moments of silence; between the lines lie entire chapters. The flicker of a micro-expression alludes to a world of mutuality in lived experience.
The conversation surges forward as if compelled, aloft on a current of anticipatory frisson. A riptide sucks you out to deeper waters and you go willingly. Words exceed denotative meaning, exceed connotative meaning, become a conduit for the ineffable. Meaning blossoms in the air between you.
They’re like dialogic time machines. As you free-fall through threads of conversation, you are borne backwards in time, trading in walls for pillow forts and becoming permeable once again to whimsy and wonder. The concept of play ages in reverse, from an allotment of time, to a state of mind, to a way of being.
Suddenly, you are collaborating with someone to create something beautiful through words. You sketch the outline of a thought, and they fill it with the shades of their perspective. You go back and forth, dipping your brush in the same color palette, and drawing the same reference. Somehow, you feel certain that you’ve both painted the exact same image in your minds.
I’ve heard them described as “wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become,” and I find that pretty fitting.
These are the conversations that feel like coming home.
Since graduating and moving to San Francisco, I’ve discovered that home isn't necessarily the place where we were born or the roof under which we live. Home can also be the recognition, empathy, and the unexpected synchrony of a chance encounter.
And so, you may find home wherever you go, in someone that you meet.
Across oceans, over mountains, on the road and beyond it, the thought that home may just be a conversation away is what pushes me to talk to people more, to be curious about them, and to have wonder about their lives.
This Substack feels like home
i love how you always drop images throughout your writing, loved the ancient turtle