With a stamp on my customs form and passage through to baggage claim, the greeting, each time, is “welcome home.” My guess is that border officials are instructed to give this specific welcome. I’m usually caught off guard by the expressiveness, the theatrics of which make me feel I’ve been caught on camera. But I have arrived and am glad to have touched ground. I smile.

Am I, really, home?

In the literal sense, I no longer have a lease or contract for internet in the US, so, no.

I pass as American (most notably when I am outside of America) and I pass as non-American (most notably when I am in it), and both of these passages are true by virtue of passport and upbringing.

Whatever I am passing as in whatever place I might find myself, there is a certain ease I feel after landing in the US, as if it were simpler to exhale (an ease that was, by way of contrast, most notable during my years in Paris, when everything from ordering lunch to standing in line was fraught with insurmountable French challenge).

It is the ease of knowing the unspoken rules of being, of athleisure getup as always acceptable and of language that fits my tongue. I am not home, exactly, but I land in a place of facility. I am at some ease in a way that captures a piece of home. (Until I think about the guns.)

From afar, not sure if America is a home, I am nonetheless invested in the ongoings. Last week, from 5,000 miles across an ocean, I watched Biden and Harris and Gaga and Goreman. In the lead-up to the inauguration, I had looked forward to it like balm for chafed skin.

As I watched its coverage, my mind went to November 2019, when I took my newborn to her appointment at the Passport Agency in Miami. My daughter curled like a marsupial into a sling that hung off my right shoulder as we weaved our way through the security line to enter the building. Past the metal detector was a framed photograph of the sitting president. Each time the line turned in that direction, I was relieved she’d not remember this historical moment. I was glad she did not know the word pussy, or the ways in which the country’s leadership had used it, or the ways in which the electorate had excused it.

Could this really be a home of hers?  With what sense of ease?

Her passport was issued a few days later, and we in short order left the country. At the Miami airport, bags packed and ready to leave, we crossed paths with hundreds of travelers, some just arriving, some being turned away, and I was aware of the privileges that come with being American.

I have not been back to the US since that departure from Miami. These fifteen months have brought ever-renewing reminders of the ways in which disquiet can exist in a space of some ease.

From afar, as so many in this pandemic have done, I have followed the ongoings of a place where I cannot go. Ongoings, notably, of institutionalized racism, police violence in the unacknowledged name thereof, of gender-based sexual abuse and economic subjugation, of a violent riot at the Capitol. These have not been surprising ongoings, but witnessing the reality from afar has felt akin to listening to sound underwater. It all happens slowly and doesn’t seem real.

It is tempting, in the name of moving forward, to inculpate specific faces and spaces in a game of moral hot potato. A president, a party, a pandemic, an election, the news, the fake news, the notion of fake news and the platforms that perpetuate it. It feels easy to point and seek to get on with it. In the lead-up to inauguration, my Facebook feed flooded with excitable memes. After January 6, politicians declared political stances, as did corporate America. Naming and shaming is vogue.

But, how did we get here?

Are we able to find ourselves in the story?

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent Atlantic piece calls for a vision that’s clear and wonders whether America might “at last see that the sight of cops and a Confederate flag among the mob on January 6, the mockery of George Floyd and the politesse on display among some of the Capitol Police, are not a matter of chance.”

The socio-political reality is also not coincidental, and “there is something to be said for staying alongside” it, as Claudia Rankine writes.

Whether we recognize this moment in time as a place of residence, whether we feel fully at ease or in the lack thereof, it is indeed a dwelling place, or in Amanda Goreman’s words, the “past we step into”. We have already been passported in.