The next train to Boston has departed Nantasket Junction. The platform is smooth and concrete with a yellow rim, and I’m standing at the ready to jump across the Atlantic. In modern slow-motion city-to-city fashion.The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Commuter Rail is formed of long and anti-aerodynamic cars that offer row upon row of oversized school bus seating. The layout is a far cry from functional, and it’s hard to nest my suitcase in any logical spot once I slide into a Naugahyde-upholstered bench. I’m trying to look both graceful and local—two things that I am not exactly. I claw at my suitcase handle in an attempt to clear it from the center aisle.

The train lumbers out of the station, and the friction of the wheels against the track is quick to remind me that the MBTA cares nothing for our ear drums. But at least the young ticket guy is friendly. He smiles at me as he jams my ticket into the top of the seat in front of me. I look down at my carry-on suitcase. It looks fairly empty, but in reality I have over-laden it with a 13lb chess set that my father designed. Somehow, I felt that I needed to carry this back to England. I always manage to find something ridiculous whenever I find myself leaving home again. As I sit and reflect on my possessions du voyage, I try to ignore the screeching train and wonder if I’m getting too old for this.

My line of thinking springs from me reflecting on the state of myself in the next 12 hours. Once I disembark this train at South Station, there’s a Silver Line bus that I will need to board, which will deposit me at Logan Airport’s Terminal A. Logan is an airport that for better or for worse is surrounded by water on three sides. It can’t expand, and it size remains enough of a treasure to make it feel manageable. Its sheen, however, always drops away when I find myself like I am now—loitering in the departure side of the house. It’s interesting because the exact same structure looks and feels different once you have just exited the sliding doors in the arrivals hall. Those first moments when you interact with Massport officials speaking with an accent that would let a blind woman know that she has made it home again. Even if the Dunkin’ coffee isn’t actually good, and the officials are rude and disinterested, it all still makes a New Englander smile.

Indeed today I am watching this landscape slowly slip away from me again. Boston and its environs disappear from view as the sun starts to set and my transatlantic flight makes ready to go. I made it through the gate and need now only hoist my bag over my head and into the overhead bin without it looking so obviously overladen. Chess set and anything else from home that I tried to mash into my suitcase. You can’t take it with you, but you sure as hell can try.

And throughout this entire evolution, the improbable question comes and goes each time the fatigue hits me from gracelessly hoisting and pitching my bag into metal storage spaces. How old is going to be too old for me to be doing this? As I finally settle into my assigned seat on the aircraft, I try to ignore the boarding around me. I close my eyes, try to forget that this flight is long enough to be long, but not long enough to engender any sort of quality sleep. It’s okay. I’m lucky enough to have this opportunity at all. Plus I’ve got a set of chess pieces, and a balsam scented pillow that reminds me of what I just left in Maine. Family stories, ones that I want to continue—and undoubtedly new ones that I am creating at this moment.

I start to project ahead to what it will be like when I finally open the door to my London flat and unload these new mementos. After one final city bus taking me home, my body will be more worn down. But even as I mentally map out the last stage of this trajectory, I recognize that at soon as I get home, I will almost immediately think to the planning required for my next journey by the end of the week. I’m tired, but I’m not yet ready to stop moving. If anything, I’ve just been recharged by this time I got to spend back in the best place in the world. Home.