The feeling of home

When you grow up all you ever do is leave. You leave people and situations and places. You always wonder where home is because you often feel like a fish out of water wherever you go. You make a home for yourself in the city, you decorate it with plants and posters of your favorite rock band, and furniture that you got from the flea market. Sometimes it get awfully quiet,other times, it's filled with the voices of your favorite new people. When it gets too quiet, you call your mother 1500 miles away and ask her about her day. You like to listen to her sometimes, but when she asks about yours, you gabble and say you're okay and then a big goodbye. You don't want to trouble her with your issues. It never completely feels like home because you're always missing something - your school friends, the old Town road, your grandma pickles, your cousins, evening drive, the smell of your room and your family. And when you return to your hometown, you miss the comfort of the living in your own place. Sunday brunches, your new friends, going on random trips, meeting strangers and the view from your balcony. The silence that used to bother you in your new home is something you crave for when you return. You realize that this will never be over, the way you are feeling. Maybe you'll get used to it when you marry someone or raise kids. But right now, you are in your 20s and life is already hard, and no mater how much you want to feel home, you end up missing things you're far away from. You think that maybe the romantics are right, maybe you will find home in another person, probably your better half. But the truth is you will find a piece of you in every place you have ever been, in every person you have ever loved. You paint your nails the way seniors in your school did when you were 12. and there's an album in the corner of your room that your first kiss suggested you listen to and that's how you discovered your favorite rock band. You find your habits lingering in the way your brother arranges his books - separating hardcover from paperback and organizing them by colours. Nobody does that, you think, you highlight important parts like your English teacher did with a lemon highlighter. You realize that blueberry yoghurt on toast and little flower of butter and orange jam isn't your recipe, it's the way your mother used to make toast for you when you were 5 years old. You noticed that your best friend still plays your road trip playlist when she drives, and you cook chicken the same way your roommate in college taught you. You share your habit of clicking pictures of flowers by the road with your dad, and like your ex, you always check traffic on maps before leaving. Even if you don't talk to them anymore, you will always have tendencies in your heart for people. You will realize that so much of them is you and so much of them is you. You realize that's why you can never be at home completely because a part of your heart is always else where, wandering in some other memory, in a different place that you used to call home. Your love spreads endlessly and then you realize that this is what happens when you have the joy of experiencing love and friendship in more than one place. You realize that when you grow up you just don't leave, rather, you take a part of them and give them a part of you and you become this beautiful medley, a mixed bag, a patchwork, quilt of all the people you have ever loved, of all the people you are ever going to love.

And someday, that feeling will be home enough....