In fact, home is not, James Baldwin would write in Giovanni’s Room, a place at all, but an irrevocable condition. In a 1957 letter to a high school friend, Baldwin would insist it was necessary to “get over” the idea that there was some place out there where he would fit in once he had “made some real peace” with himself. There was no such place. Maybe there was no such peace or, if there was, it was fleeting, slippery, unsteady.

A person’s inner and outer environments were one and the same, Baldwin wrote, and those of us in the in-between understand the truth of this, too. Those of us not anchored to some specific geography, some patch of land, we understand turtles and shells. We see home as an inward condition, a reality we don’t just create, but are constantly creating. We realize home is a place we make, and that makes us, again and again and again.