I remember the first time I referred to my college campus as “home”. I was coming back from a trip. At that moment I have been living in West Virginia for several months. Is it weird that I started to call this place “home”? Somebody corrected me reminding that college cannot be anyone’s home.
All my life I have been learning that “home” has certain meanings: a birthplace, an ownership, a household. According to those people, my home is 6,514 miles away, a myriad of borders between us. And it is true. My mind travels those 6,514 miles revisiting places of my childhood over and over again. Turkmenabat — a place where desert ends and life begins. Its streets are always covered in sand and dust. In summers, people sell soda by a cup and ice-cream on every other corner. It’s 110 degrees in a shade, and the shade is hard to find.
An apartment on a second floor of a two-story building with two rooms and a tiny kitchen. There I would sit on a window sill with the window open, and if I shout loud enough, my friend would hear me from two apartments away and open her window. In that apartment, every winter morning I would wake up and see my cat curled up at my feet. And then, every once in a while I would think about our old apartment where I lived till I was six. I would remember having there a big party for my fifth birthday, and that Christmas when I got a tricycle from Santa. That apartment was also my home and, in some sense, it still is.
In spite of changing apartments, cities, and countries or maybe because of that, I do not feel that I lost my home. Memories keep for me all the places and people who matter. My roots are not grasping land, they grasp people. People are home. Their voices, smiles, the heaviness of their steps… For me home was always an ethereal intangible matter, something that I could not claim or buy, only build with my soul. So day after day I keep building it. This time, it’s a different town and a different continent, but my home is not a static place; it can expand and grow with me. I have one home with many rooms, hallways and places hidden deep in the future, places I do not yet know about. For me home will always be way more than a two-story house with a white picket fence because my home does not have borders, and one day it will be as big as the world.
