12/16/24

Since the Summer of 2022, I've had, paid for, and lived in my first big-boy apartment. I decorated it, cooked in it, laughed in it, cried in it, and had a good amount of love in it as well. It's the place I long for no matter how far from it I am, the place my best friends are, the place 'my' cat lives, the place I think of when I think of home. Yet twice a year, I pack up my biggest suitcase, book a flight, and fly 3000 miles to a place I put myself in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to move out of. As I sit on my flight from one red state to another, slightly greener one, leaving the family I made to visit the family I was born into, I can't help but think about 'home' and what such an undefinable word really means. 

In grade school, asking me which house I would be staying at over the weekend did not suggest a weekend getaway or small family cabin in the Poconos, but rather a fitting question for someone whose residence in a house was frequently interrupted by court-appealed split custody agreements, not to mention the stupendous amount of time spent in grandparents houses while one, both, or all parents were preoccupied. I have a somewhat vague memory of running errands with a friend and his mother before returning to their house for a sleepover. Bored with grocery shopping for food I wasn't going to eat, I asked my friend when we were going home, excited to begin a night of unprecedented internet access that my parents would never allow. He looked at me confused and asked why I wanted to go home before we had even gotten back to his house. It shocked me that he didn't know what I meant. Obviously I didn't live at his house, so his home was not my "home", but it seemed even more obvious that I wasn't talking about my home either being as how we hadn't even 30 minutes into what was supposed to be a 12-hour 3rd-grade sleepover extravaganza. It struck me than that "home" was just what I thought of as the place you stay when you aren't doing other things, and not as something designated to one place or even, one person who owns it. When you get done running errands you go "home", when someone visits often you say "welcome home", and when you're at school and you don't want to be anymore, you say "I want to go home". 

Home never felt like one thing or place, but something more closely related to a feeling or sense. In my college days, beyond the concrete block, I have turned into my home through more than enough trips to Goodwill, and what I could only describe as a trauma bond, "home" has taken on a whole new meaning. My Dad had always been firm in his desire to depart from the town we grew up in, maybe even more so than I was - which is saying something considering the second I got the chance I moved to the farthest college I got accepted into. Once his oldest had graduated and moved back, agreeing to figure things out largely on her own, and his youngest was packing the last 18 years of his life into a suitcase, he and my stepmom saw their opportunity to get their foot out of the door. The downside for me was, that this door led them to live about two hours away from me in Arizona, which somewhat negated my whole mission to find "home" anywhere but where it already was. Consequently on my return, my "home" was an entirely new experience. My mom has similarly taken advantage of her newly Christian-free home, and moved my bed out of my room, leaving me a pull-out couch in what had been my sister's room up until she graduated college. The rooms I had spent just as much energy as I now spend on my apartment to feel like a space with "me" written all over it had essentially been stripped of their innate Christian-ness, leaving an office for my sister's boyfriend - including a gaming PC and a bud light flag on my yellow, indie, Flowerboy and Clairo circa 2018 aesthetic walls - in what used to be my Dads house, and the room previously attributed to my two brothers and myself now had full reign to grow a specific pubescent boyish scent that somehow managed to have an unmoving mess every time I returned to it. "Home" was now more my sister's house, and my mother's house, which admittedly did have a much more consistent emotion attached to it no matter which room I was placed in over breaks. "Home" became a vague descriptor for the place in which my family lived, and even less of a physical house than it had been even before I departed from it. 

My mom, as most moms should, has a sign in her bathroom that reads "Home is where the heart is", and this is the perspective I've led most of my life with. The biggest constant to a "home" has been the people that I find when I enter it. For the last four years, it's been the friends that I'm already planning tables for at my wedding. People who have seen the version of me with the most work done, with the most maturity and growth, and people who I hope to see 5, 10, 20 years down the line becoming the versions of themselves that, even if they're not in my home anymore, I will continue to hold a home for them in my heart. It's the shreds of myself that I find scattered through the town I live in, the town I used to live in, and artifacts of the people I think of the most. It's the physical representation of myself that I hang on the walls and organize on my desk, and likewise, the representations of my roommates I find in the folded blankets under the side table, the decorative pillows on the couch, the plants next to the TV and the dirty dishes in the sink. Before it was the family that I made for myself, it was the people who held me when I was small and still held me when I wasn't, popped the pimples on my cheek (my grandmother has a strange obsession with this), and washed my mouth out with soap. "Home is where the heart is" feels almost like an oversimplification when my heart feels like it can belong to many people, in many places simultaneously.