It’s my fifth time on a plane in the last two weeks, and I’m tired. I don’t want to fly anymore. I just want to be home. I always want to travel, but there’s always a point of time when I am away from home when I just want to go back home now. I don’t think I have felt this way almost ever until the past year: during one or two moments in Taiwan in July, likely when I was sweating buckets in that God-awful humidity I thought, I would really love to be back in New York now. During moments in New Zealand where I was vomiting, I would have preferred to be vomiting in my own toilet. And this past Friday in San Francisco, I just wanted to go home and be in my own bed. San Francisco no longer feels like true home to me. I feel like a visitor when I go there. I don’t really feel like I belong.

And within hours of going back to my apartment in Manhattan, what did I end up doing? After unpacking, eating dinner, seeing a show, and coming back to the apartment, I ended up in my happy place: my kitchen — to prepare breakfast for the next day for our visiting guests. My kitchen in my apartment is my happy place. It feels good to be home and to have my luggage put away.