It begins, always, with the question: Where are you based?
The assumption inside the question is quiet but absolute. That there must be a singular answer. A point on the map to which you belong more than all others. Somewhere to which all other journeys return.
Sometimes I answer with the name of the place I woke up in. Sometimes with the country on my passport. Sometimes I say nowhere or everywhere, and watch for the flicker in their eyes—that almost-imperceptible tightening.
The truth is neither. The truth is everywhere I have chosen to linger long enough for the light to feel familiar, for the fruit seller to know which peaches I will point to, for my footsteps to find the same stretch of cracked pavement without thinking.
Constellated belonging
We are told, in subtle and constant ways, that belonging is a singular relationship. That home is monogamous. That to commit to one place is to deepen into it, and to scatter oneself across many is to dilute the bond.
But belonging is not a zero-sum game.
To love one place does not require the erasure of all others. To know the seasons of one street does not mean you cannot also know the tides of another coast.
Constellated belonging is the quiet refutation of the myth of singular rootedness. It is the slow accumulation of relationships with multiple places—not in the voracious, extractive cadence of consumption, but in the returning rhythm of friendship. In this rhythm, the spaces between visits do not weaken the thread; they test and prove it.
The polyamory analogy holds, or even that of friendship: an intimacy with one does not diminish intimacy with another. It may even deepen it, the way learning the dialect of one language makes the patterns of another more vivid. The loyalty is not to exclusivity, but to presence when present, to tending the bond each time you arrive.
In this model, home is not a fortress but a cluster of stars—each bright on its own, but forming meaning in relation to the others.
Fluidity
Constellated belonging depends on a particular posture toward place: a refusal to be enclosed by one, a willingness to be shaped by many.
Baselessness in this sense is not the absence of anchor. It is the decision not to let any single ground claim the right to define you entirely. It resists the cultural demand for enclosure—the mortgage, the lease, the singular postal address as proof of existence.
We are trained to speak about ourselves in locative shorthand: I’m from X, I live in Y. These are coordinates meant to make us legible to strangers, to position us within the invisible cartographies of class, culture, and nation. To be baseless is to step outside that legibility.
This refusal can unsettle. Not only others, but oneself. Without a primary location, the question of who you are no longer slots neatly into the story of where you are from. Identity unmoors from geography and, for some, begins to drift. For others, the drift is the point.
This stance is porous by design. To move between many homes is to allow oneself to be altered by each—to take on the rhythms of their markets, their winters, their ways of greeting—and then to carry those alterations elsewhere. It is less about collecting and more about layering: a slow sedimentation of selves shaped by multiple grounds.
Misreadings & projections
From the outside, baselessness is easy to misread.
It can be mistaken for instability—the assumption that movement must be compensating for some inability to stay. For lack of commitment—the suspicion that one’s ties are shallow because they are plural. For rootlessness—the belief that without a single permanent address, one’s life is a form of drift, subject to wind and whim.
These readings come from a cultural grammar in which base equals stability, and stability equals worth. They are not neutral descriptions, but value judgments masquerading as common sense.
In the baselessness I know, the anchor is not absent; it is simply distributed. Commitment is measured not in uninterrupted duration, but in repeated return. The roots are rhizomatic, stretching horizontally rather than drilling down into one patch of soil.
There is also the projection of envy disguised as dismissal—the quiet suggestion that the baseless life is an escape from responsibility. But anyone who has navigated multiple geographies, relationships, and rhythms knows this is not true. The responsibilities are simply of a different order: to maintain ties across distance, to adapt with fluency, to keep oneself intact without the reinforcement of a single cultural surround.
Still, there is a difference worth naming. Baselessness here is chosen. It is a privilege, even when earned, to move by appetite rather than necessity. It should not be conflated with the displacement of those who live without a base because they have been denied one. But the fact of this distinction need not negate the validity of chosen baselessness as a form of life worth examining on its own terms.
Temporality & appetite
Baselessness is not a life sentence. It is an orientation that can shift.
There are those who live it for a season—a few itinerant years before settling into a long-term base. There are those who alternate, anchoring for a while before loosening the lines again. And there are those for whom the movement itself becomes the base, the through-line in a life otherwise in flux.
The appetite changes. One year, the idea of returning to the same four places feels nourishing. Another year, the pull is toward the unfamiliar. Baselessness allows for these oscillations without defining them as failures or departures from the “real” life. The flexibility is part of the structure.
And yet, even in its fluidity, baselessness offers continuity. The pattern of movement itself becomes the architecture: the list of cities you know like the backs of your hands, the friends you see only in certain latitudes, and the seasonal migrations that shape your calendar more than any civic holiday.
Time moves differently here. Without a single home to mark its passage, time is measured in arrivals and returns, in the reappearance of fruit in a market, in the way a street changes between visits. The years are not chapters stacked neatly in one place, but layers of translucent maps overlaid until the outlines blur.
Cartographies of elsewhere
To live without a singular base is not to live without home. It is to live in relation to many homes, each with its own gravity, each altering your trajectory in ways you may not notice until you are elsewhere.
There is discipline here: in tending ties across distance, in resisting the seduction of enclosure for its own sake, in allowing oneself to remain unfinished by any single place. And there is generosity, too: in letting places and people matter deeply without demanding they be yours alone.
Baselessness is not for everyone, nor should it be. But for those who choose it, and choose it with care, it can be a way of living that refuses the false binary between everywhere and nowhere. It can be a way of answering where are you based? with something truer than a coordinate.
Imagine, instead, answering with a pattern of stars. No single one the center, yet together forming a shape only you could trace.
And perhaps that is the quiet truth of baselessness: not that you lack a base, but that your base has no borders—only constellations, always in motion, always in relation.
