Nobody’s home.

There’s a song by Avril Lavigne that has followed me since I was a teenager. Nobody’s home. It tells the story of a girl who can’t find her place, who feels lost, “broken inside,” with no home to return to, no space to dry her tears.

I listened to it again these past days, after almost a month spent between Copenhagen and Oslo — cities that, for different reasons, feel deeply familiar to me, almost like they already belong. And I realized that in Modena, the city where I was born, I have never truly felt at home. There are affections there, strong cultural roots, but not that immediate sense of recognition, that peace that should come from feeling in tune with a place.

Seven years ago, I moved to Milan. I built much of my adult life there: a stable job, solid friendships, a neighborhood I know by heart. And yet, despite all this, it doesn’t feel like home. I can’t picture myself here five or ten years from now. Milan has given me a lot, but over time it seems to have taken even more: energy, lightness, the possibility of feeling whole.

This feeling is not only mine. It’s part of a wider, generational condition. We grew up in a time when “home” has become mobile, temporary, precarious. Not only because of economics — high rents, unstable work, constant moves — but also because of the way we live our relationships and build our identities. We move in search of places that resemble us, that let us breathe, that don’t ask us to become someone else in order to exist.

The paradox is that wherever we go, we carry the same emptiness with us. The song says: She wants to go home, but nobody’s home. It’s a condition I know well. Not just the absence of a roof, but of belonging. The feeling of being “all over the place,” as if every attempt at rooting oneself slips away.

And yet, during those days in Northern Europe, I felt something different. A wider breath, a way of living that didn’t ask me to shrink. Perhaps it’s there that the idea of home begins to resemble a possibility.

Maybe for our generation “home” is no longer a fixed point, but a movement. Not nostalgia, but tension. Not return, but search. We live everywhere, and yet never truly live anywhere. But in this being “broken inside,” in this lack, perhaps there is also the drive to reinvent belonging, to imagine new ways of living, new homes that don’t exist yet.