Have you ever come home, to a place you've never been before
Memory“Have you ever come home, to a place you've never been before?” is Miles Vorkosigan’s paradoxical image for encountering a sense of belonging in unfamiliar territory. The phrase joins homecoming to first arrival: what feels like home is not a place he remembers, but a future he is only beginning to enter.
Use and Meaning
Miles immediately calls the feeling odd, then qualifies that strangeness as “not at all unpleasant.” The contrast keeps the expression from being simple nostalgia. Its homecoming is prospective rather than literal: familiarity arrives alongside novelty, making the experience both disorienting and welcome.
Context in the Conversation
Miles offers the phrase while talking about becoming an Imperial Auditor and getting to know his new colleagues. His interlocutor responds that he may fit in after all, and the conversation closes with her urging him to be a good bureaucrat-paladin and make her proud. The image thus gives emotional shape to a transition into civilian work: the new vocation is unfamiliar, but already carries the possibility of belonging.
