When I was still small enough to fit in the sun-drenched space between the armoire and the couch, I sat cross-legged and spun the world. My globe stood upright, supported by a smooth base and almost as tall as I was. Labeled in sepia tones with creases for valleys and three-dimensional mountain ranges, it was the kind that makes you want to run your hands over every country, that begs to be explored.

I used to whirl this world recklessly, close my eyes, point a finger, and imagine living wherever I landed: in Tel Aviv or Tegucigalpa or Islamabad. After each imagined journey, I traced my way home. Traveling through the Sahara, over the Andes, and past the Nile, until I reached just above Boston, just below New Hampshire. Until I was safe in my little house in a town too small to see.

Once, after looking at my model Earth, I asked my mother about East Germany. She laughed wearily, “That map is old.” And I realized that so many places I had imagined no longer existed. On my globe, the Soviet Union would always spread across a whole hemisphere, the northern ice sheet would never slide into the sea, African nations doomed to divide and recombine and divorce bloodily would forever lie flat and whole beneath my palms.

When my parents divorced my world moved. It was packed up and driven to my mother’s new house where it stood in a corner as I grew up. Each week I walked between two homes, charting the topography of awkward phone calls, overnight bags, and email conversations. At first I mourned the loss of that confident sense of place and of belonging that I experienced when I was little. I felt like I was searching for a feeling, for a country that didn’t exist anymore.

But as I continued to navigate my way through this different type of geography, I would occasionally go back to the hollow model world, watch it wobble on its axis and begin to understand how to live, even grow, despite imperfection.

I am now taller than the globe; my mother has the armoire and my father kept the couch. Yet I do not feel split in half. I no longer have one home to trace my way back to, but I don’t mind.
I have learned to make homes for myself: in the art rooms of my high school, in a tent at camp each summer, in the people I am surrounded by — my friends. In my mother, in my father.
I have found small places for myself, hung drawings on their walls, bought carpets for their floors, come to know myself beneath their roofs.

I am an artist. I am a writer. I am a daughter. I have paint under my nails and charcoal dust in my hair. I check out too many books from the library and always bring them back overdue. I scribble notes on my hands and in my journals and find scraps of paper in my pockets. I am perpetually in love with hiking boots, the clunky kind. I am an okay cook. I am an awful liar.

I am developing self-awareness, but I still have so much to learn. I want to speak new languages. I want to read all the time. I want to travel to actual countries and take pictures on a bunch of disposable cameras because there is something magic about those blurry images that develop in the dark. I want to scale real mountains, close my eyes and sit cross-legged on their tops while the whole world around me spins wildly into the future.