Homecoming

by Kate Morton

A cruel fact of life, that parents and children shared so many fundamental experiences but only one of the pair retained the memories. It was a lonely position to occupy, the sole rememberer.

Home, she’d realised, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of ‘home’ wasn’t ‘away’, it was ‘lonely’. When someone said, ‘I want to go home’, what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.