When the summer came to a close and I faced the beginning of my junior year of high school, I spent several weeks, or perhaps a month, living in my car—a red Ford Taurus I affectionately named Harrison. Looking up at the night sky through his moonroof, I spent many hours mulling over the old adage, “it takes a village to raise a child.”

From there, I spent time in the home of a brilliant biologist with whom I spent many glorious evenings hunched over the kitchen table with a bottomless pot of tea, identifying the vegetation we’d found in our travels, spending hours trying to name a single leaf.

Then, there was the former-actress, a glamorous woman in her late fifties who I will always remember as standing out on her back porch at dusk, a cigarette dangling from her long, elegant fingers. When I miss her, I go to the convenience store and buy a package of Basic Ultralights. I light one and I can almost see her, standing there just as the light of the evening changed, and hear her when she would turn to me, exhaling after a long drag, and say,

“Princess, don’t you just love the pink light?”

In 2009, when I was eighteen, I moved to New York for college. I lived in an apartment with two other girls and three boys. The two years I spent there were the happiest of my life. When I got sick and needed to leave, the Dean of Students told me I needed to go home to recuperate. I looked at them and said, “Home?” —but I was home.

The next few years were largely spent in a long string of apartments, though I was so fortunate to have, too, the love and support of my aunt who lives in this area. Striking out on my own, I met a man. Together, he and I too shared a string of apartments and for a time during those years, home was not a place—but a person. It was the feeling of his toes next to mine in bed at night. It was the sound of his mother singing in the kitchen while she made dinner when we would visit them Friday nights. It was the low, soulful serenade of an upright bass, his father’s morning ritual.

When that relationship came to an end, and I was alone again, I spent some time reflecting on other failed romantic relationships and I thought about the boyfriend I had in high school. He was a Canadian expat with dreadlocks and a denim vest with Metallica patches sewn on (aren’t we all entitled to at least one “bad boy in our lifetimes?”) We spent long nights in his dimly lit apartment, chainsmoking American Spirits and talking about life. I remembered one night in particular where I shared this story of mine, about my gypsy years, my nomadic adolescence, and he said,

“You’re like this bird I’ve read about—the sooty tern. They’re a sea bird. They fly for years nonstop without ever landing—though they do occasionally float on the waves for a few miles of rest, they’ll lift their wings and fly thousands of thousands of miles from home. They’ll fly for five, seven, ten years. Decades. They are constantly in flight.”

He was right, I was like that bird. Though, I immediately became concerned about the fate of such a bird—it was exhausting for me, so wasn’t it exhausting for them too? What happened to these birds, did they just fall out of the sky dead one day?

He had continued, though, perhaps sensing my fear.

“Then, after maybe a decade of this, something miraculous happens. A primal shift occurs in them. See, these birds have an unparalled homing instinct. When the time comes, even if they are half way round the world, they can get home. It’s incredible, they’ve traveled nonstop for ten years but when the time comes and nature kicks in, they can go home.”