What is home?
I remember seeing my home as the house I lived in until I was three years old, one that is now blurred from the memories of the following years. That was home. As we moved to another town, into the house I have been living in ever since, I got confused. Was that now supposed to be home? But the confusion did not last for long, as I quickly got accustomed to the white house with the red roof, the big garden filled with flowers and the long driveway. That has been home ever since.
But as I grew older, I started to long for different places, having been grown up with the all time wanderlust that still runs through my veins, being inherited from my parents who got it from their parents who got it from their parents. I traveled this planet walking hand in hand with my parents and siblings and I always felt home, for I was with them.
That’s when I realized that home is also the people you surround yourself with, that you embrace with love and who care for you. Home is my sister, my brother, my parents, my aunts, uncles, cousins. Home is my best friend, my girlfriends. Their homes are part of my homes.
“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.” — Abraham Verghese
And as I got even older, I started to feel home in places I felt good in. The first time I felt home in another country, even though I had never been there before in my life was in Ireland 2007. I found myself feeling so at peace and thinking about moving there when I was older.
Home is Ireland, home is London. The Australian desert is home and so is the parque tayrona in Colombia. Roads are home and airports and airplanes and libraries and bookstores.
I’ve been living in Florida for a month now and I built myself another home withing the walls of my boyfriend’s apartment.
He is home, too.
It sometimes leaves me with the problem of not knowing where exactly I belong and wanting to know where I do. But what I also realized is, that
I am home.
Wherever I am, I am home, because my body is my home. I have a lot of homes. Home is a place where I feel safe, where the demons in my head can’t get me. My homes change and I do not always feel safe in places that I used to call home or usually do. In those moments I always want to be somewhere else. And it’s never just one place or one person, because losing that place or person would mean to lose home.
