Eight years ago this week I was living in Paris. I’d not been there long, so my language proficiency was functional, at best. It was a Tuesday morning and I was online at the library, when CNN interrupted my screen to live-cast two planes hitting the Twin Towers. It felt like a Punk that had gone horribly wrong.

Americans were advised to avoid public places, including the metro. I remember walking home in the rain, drenched by awareness that our world wasn’t the copasetic place I once believed. I wasn’t too close with my family at this point, but recall a deep longing for their voices that week. Calls wouldn’t go through though, and the two times I did reach a payphone operator, my ability to speak was frozen in tears.

In general, I love Parisians, but during this tragedy, I hated them. They wanted to analyze and blame; I wanted home. They wanted to intellectualize a nightmare; I wanted a fresh dream.

Two years ago at this time, I met a drug addict stuck in prostitution, or prostitute stuck in drug addiction. Overall, her progress has been phenomenal, but there are still points when I wonder if all this is worth it. She called this morning at 3am saying she loved me, but life had taken its toll and she’d had enough. This week alone, her seventeen-year-old daughter found-out she’s pregnant; her twenty-year-old is cutting herself and following in mom’s footsteps of drugs and stripping; her former abuser found her new phone number; worsening carpal-tunnel syndrome kept her out work for the twenty-fourth week; and she was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. All she could verbalize for the first five minutes was, “Abbie, I just wanna go home…I don’t know where it is…or what it’s about…but I know it’s not here.” Hope was on its last breath.

I think it’s a grace that we don’t experience literal states of being home-sick more often, or else I don’t think we’d make it. I think all be willed about thirty-three years, tops, and that would be enough—that would be all our hearts could endure.

Most of our conversation this morning was spent in despair—spent in the unanswered questions of loss, death and confusion. But there were a handful of minutes where my friend shared (for probably the fortieth time) her dreams of a shoe-design, by which she’d “forever change the fashion of walking.” Even if just for a few minutes, it was as if finding a space and language for her dream found a window for another world. When my friend giggled about neon laces and the insignia on the sole, I knew she would make it through this night.

Psychologically speaking, maybe pushing people toward their dreams is pulling them from reality. But realistically speaking, maybe reality is too much to bear at times, and childish invitations toward unreality—toward dreams—are the closest way Home.