What is it to you? A place, a person, a feeling? To me, home has been one of those things at some point or another, and has slowly become none of them. Whether you are a college student, someone who travels for work, or someone who never quite had the life that allowed an easy conjuring of the word “home”—you’ve probably thought about this question one way or another.
I’m 20 and I have two semesters left in college. I’m sitting on my bed thinking about how to put this post together as I rip apart one of the cherry-flavored Pull-n-Peel Twizzlers that were a childhood favorite. Well, actually, it’s not my bed, but just another temporary bed. These walls are not my walls, and the floor is not mine either. When I go home, or as I’ve come to term it as “My Parent’s House” I come to the same conclusion. That turquoise loft bed is not my bed, but just a temporary bed until the summer ends. The American flag-themed walls in the kitchen are not my walls, but just there to keep me warm when I start to miss my family on a random weekend in March. Yes, that was home to me once. That bed was my bed, and those walls were the walls I ate almost every meal in-between. But lately I have been conflicted with the agitating realization that it is no longer so.
Mom, I don’t mean to make you cry and Dad, I don’t want to disappoint you—but that is not my home. And home to me is not the feeling I get on a morning when the dogs are smiling at me when it is still too early to think, but I’m happy because they’re always happy. Home is not the feeling of soccer cleats stomping on freshly cut grass on a warm September afternoon when I was 16. Nor is home the person I found who made me feel safe and wanted even when I felt helpless and naive in a dingy dorm room at nineteen. Home is all of those things and none of those things, and I hope you understand that.
So maybe it’s because I have made myself into my own home. I’ve made room in the holes of my chest for people who have come to stay, and even more room for those who were there from the start. I know they are always there—at home. Even when they’re really studying at the University of Buffalo, or living in a different town with their girlfriend now, or when they’re 2,272 miles away in California. I’ve cleared the clutter in my mind that has weighed me down and whispered in my ear that I am not pretty and that I cannot be loved, and the anxiety of why my high school best friend doesn’t keep in touch anymore. Instead I’ve made room to remember the compliments, and all the dogs I saw today, and my mom’s laugh, and the ever constant reminder that I am going somewhere even better than where I am now. And where ever that is I know I will always be home, because I am my own home.
