Homesick

What happens when home no longer feels like home

This morning I woke up in my flat in London and, for the first time, I felt it.
Homesick.
Not for a place on a map—but for something heavier, blurrier.

I missed the California sun through my kitchen windows.
The sofas I had custom made to fit a room I no longer sit in.
The kids’ rooms I built out piece by piece—paint colors, beds, cribs, toy chests.
I missed my dog’s annoying bark at the front door.
I missed my friends. Their laughter, their stories, their kids, the way we used to be just… there.

But when I closed my eyes and tried to picture “home,”
I didn’t see it.
The United States doesn’t feel like home anymore.
Not the way it used to.

I grew up in a country that gave me a kind of quiet confidence,
an almost naïve certainty that we were the good guys.
We helped our allies.
We shared life-saving medicines with the world.
We cared for the sick, no matter where they were born.
We believed in checks and balances—
in the idea that no one was above the law,
that power was meant to be questioned, not worshipped.

We weren’t perfect—far from it.
But we were trying.
And that trying felt like something sacred.

Today I look back, and I can’t find that place.
I don’t recognize the headlines.
I don’t recognize the noise.
And I don’t know how to go home to something that doesn’t exist anymore.

So I sit here, in a place I chose, in a life I built,
and I ache for something I may never find again.

I’m homesick.
And I don’t know when I’ll go home again.