Going Home
I woke yesterday morning as though I had never quite returned from sleep. Not rested, not renewed—just carried over, like a body moving out of habit rather than will. Cancer has a way of doing that. It does not always shout; sometimes it dulls, softens the edges of being until you feel less like a person and more like a shadow rehearsing the motions of one.
I walked for half an hour, thinking movement might call me back into myself. But even then, there was that strange distance—as though I were watching someone else walk ahead of me, someone I was meant to recognise. The world was there, but I was not fully in it. There are days like that, when energy is not the problem so much as presence.
Later, I sat and read Rip Van Winkle, a story I had been meaning to return to. You probably know it—Rip, careless and drifting, falls in with the wrong company, drinks too much, and sleeps through decades. When he wakes, he assumes it is the same day. But nothing answers to him anymore. Faces are unfamiliar. Home does not receive him as it once did. It is not just time that has passed—it is belonging that has slipped away.
It struck me, perhaps more than it should have, that the story is not really about sleep, but about identity. About how quietly it can dissolve when the threads that hold it—place, people, memory—are loosened. Rip does not just lose years; he loses the context that made him himself.
By the afternoon, still heavy with that same inward fog, I put on Runrig’s Final Concert at Stirling Castle, namely, The Last Dance. There is something about Runrig that reaches into places words alone cannot. As the first part closed with “Going Home,” a flock of geese passed overhead on the screen—winging their way somewhere certain. It felt almost too deliberate, too symbolic to ignore. The instinct of return, written into them. No hesitation. No doubt.
I found myself envying the songwriters. For them, home seems anchored—Skye, the Hebrides, a landscape that holds memory in its bones. Even when they leave, they are still oriented toward something. There is a direction to their longing.
I noticed a woman near the front of the crowd—a German lady perhaps. Her face held something close to tears. I wondered where home was for her. Or if, perhaps, she was feeling that peculiar ache—the Germans call it Ferwweh—a longing not for where you’ve been, but for somewhere you have never known, yet somehow miss all the same. Runrig has a way of awakening that. A kind of homesickness without a map.
I was adopted as a child. My new family moved often. Places came and went before they could settle into anything solid. I attended four primary schools before high school. And so, like Rip stepping back into a world that no longer fits, I sometimes feel that “home” is not something I can return to, only something I circle around. Recognisable, but never quite mine.
Perhaps that is what it means, in an existential sense, to be homeless—not without shelter, but without a fixed centre. To live with the quiet question: where do I belong, when belonging itself has no stable ground?
And yet, even in that, there is something shared. A recognition that many of us are, in our own ways, wandering between versions of home—remembered, imagined, or hoped for. I’m sure the longing itself is a kind of home. Not solid, not certain, but real enough to feel. “Ò, cho mealltach”
Going Home by Runrig: Going Home
Image by Copilot