The Way Home
August 23, 2026
The sun shone on my face as I walked the wild, virgin sandy paths. Untouched and so perfect… I was on my way to the beach… euphoric about my impending rendezvous with an old lover, the ocean… ecstatic about the upcoming shopping scene, already playing on screen 2 somewhere in my mind…
“Oh, I can’t believe I’m finally back here.”
The lightness, the blue and turquoise of the water, the golden sand beneath my feet — the wet, sticky, humid air… it all felt exactly as this place had always felt.
Like home…
Then, after my editorial walk through paradise, my eyes mercilessly erased the landscape my mind had so beautifully painted.
It was only a dream…
One that keeps repeating itself.
A haunting that takes me back to the ocean, back to timeless beauty, back to a fantasy land that isn’t fantasy at all — one that is real, waiting, calling my name…
Yet thousands and thousands of miles away.
The great tragedy of my life is that the land where I was born and the place where I belong have never been one and the same.
And when life anchors you somewhere that never quite feels like yours, you spend your life running, searching for the place that does. But life isn’t perfect — and even when you find it, home isn’t always yours to keep…
A few weeks ago, I found myself at a birthday party.
Fifty-something people — most of them family — had gathered around long tables to celebrate a life.
Loud music…
Distasteful loudness.
No space left for a thought to wander, let alone a conversation.
Food. Glasses. Dancing. People, movements, glances I had watched my entire life.
And yet, it all felt impossibly distant and foreign.
There is a peculiar pain in being native to a place that has never felt like home.
Always an alien…
I sat at the table, watching everyone revel in what, to me, felt like anything but fun…
Sean Carter would say, “You was who you was before you got here.”
And thank God, somewhere in between it all, I am still me.
My soul had absolutely no idea what it was doing there…
I couldn’t help but ask myself:
Why?
As if someone was going to whisper me the answer…
While everybody else was dancing, my mind decamped.
It flew back to the old Grey Lady and set another table.
A big one, on some porch beside the sea. Covered in flowers. Intimate. Blessed with an eloquent silence — one where only the sea performed and the art of conversation was the centerpiece…
Off-white. Blue hydrangeas. Scallops and asparagus on oversized pearl plates… Crab cakes. Oysters on ice. Briny martinis — rims jeweled with sea-salt diamonds… Salt in the air. Candles…
No screaming over music.
No spectacle.
Just love, art, the sea, and conversations that filled the silence better than any noise could ever.
And there it was again — the strange realization that I had spent another evening physically present somewhere while mentally living some place else.
Enough!
I was jealous… How lucky are those born home.
They inherit their streets, their people, their language, their traditions, and never have to question whether they belong among them.
Others have to go looking.
Across cities.
Across countries.
Across oceans.
Sometimes we find home in people. Sometimes in a city we have known for a day. Sometimes in waters thousands of kilometers away from where we come.
And sometimes we find it only to discover the tragedy of the right place at the wrong time.
So, while I was busy trying to predict the next hand before fate had even finished shuffling the deck, it dealt me…
Venice… and what comes after Venice sounds even better…
The mystery of life… Some paths could never be found by looking for them. The places we are destined to find have a way of finding us first.
So, on August 31st — my birthday — instead of moving to Zurich as planned, I will find myself flying off to Italy for a styling project at the Venice Film Festival.
Out of the blue, the map changed again.
The East Coast. Nantucket. Palm Beach. The Big Apple…
I know they are waiting.
Meanwhile, fate has a few other plans for me first.
Perhaps that is the thing about finding your way home.
They say knowing is born of contrast and separation — to perceive the essence of a thing, we must first trace its edges against everything it is not.
What if we need to sit at the wrong tables to recognize the right ones; to feel foreign somewhere so we can define home.
And every once in a while, just when we think we have figured out the next move, fate reaches across the table with the arrogance of the omniscient, gathers the cards back into its hands… and shuffles them again.
Certainly — sooner or later, it deals you home.
Thank you for reliving this moment with me!
See you next Sunday at 4.
Love, Kiki