No matter who you are and what age you are, you’ve experienced home. Sometimes home isn’t where you have a house and a family. Sometimes your home is a place where you heart resides. It’s where your happiness lives and where your heart's most filled. This is possible because home is not a place or a specific location; often times it may seem that way but it’s not it’s a feeling. We chose that somewhere as our home because of how we feel in this location.
For me, home is 1,345 miles and a three-hour plane ride away from my house. It’s where I hear the rustle of cars in the busy city, or see the towering skyscrapers that companies build to stand out on the causeway. It’s where you lose 1,203,893 pounds in one summer because it’s so hot you can’t walk outside without breaking a sweat. It’s where memories are made. It’s where you laugh your day away like in cliché scenes from movies of your great aunt dancing her hip out to the songs of her time after she’s had a little too many glasses of liquid happiness. It’s when you get into crazy late night adventures with your cousins in places you didn’t know existed, or when you jump from heights you never imagined into beautiful blue waters. It’s swimming in the deepest and bluest of waters with creatures you never imagined. Watching the crabs crawl underneath you as you move your arms throughout the water breaking the perfect calm flow. Feeling the fish splash you underwater with their fins and attempting to clean you with their deep-sea kisses. Home is the feeling I get when I have to say see you later and my heart breaks that I will be separated from the happiness my heart gives me. Then I temporarily feel it again through the international phone calls when I can hear the wind through the phone, or the sounds of the wildlife in the background of my grandmother's melancholy tone as she wishes the conversation was in person and not through an awkward signal phone.
As time goes on, homes grow and we find new homes to add to our current feelings. My addition consists of more than 65 women. It does have a house or a specific location. It may have a radius, but nothing more. This home is what taught me that home is a feeling. The moment I ran into the open hearts of my sisters I felt the kindred heart of home. As I processed home and listened to “Tha Tha Theta Phi” probably 15 times I felt it rush inside of me. It captured me more and more… It drew me in for a week before I finally entered. The feeling of this home captured me with the inspiration my sisters gave me to be “the best”. It drew me in with the personality my sisters brought out in me. For the first time in forever I was just me. No hiding myself, no putting on a show, no filtering myself. I was free to be me whether that meant dancing embarrassingly, laughing awkwardly and being okay with it, or being downright stupid – they loved me. Since I felt home I yearn to grow the feeling to become a deeper part of it, to do more for my home and to let it take over me. This home doesn’t take as much inside me as much as the other home does, but this home does teach me and grow me more than any home I’ve ever had. This home has made me who I and I couldn't be any more proud to wear my letters and my newfound self.
While both of these homes are far when they become a location, they will forever have a place in my heart no matter how far I go and they will always be desired no matter how much I grow.
