No Place Like Home

I've spent most of my life in Illinois. There was a brief time- almost two years- during which my family and I lived in Georgia and then Tennessee, but we were soon back in Illinois. Actually, saying we were back in Illinois hardly does it justice. We moved back to the same town in which I was raised, just three blocks from the house we lived in before. After only a couple of years, I was able to enter the seventh grade with all of my friends from elementary school without missing a beat. If I believed in fate I'd say that it was evidence of the universe righting itself. Fate or no, I'm very glad things worked out the way they did.

The house we moved into was undeniably "home" for the next few years. From seventh grade until the end of high school there were birthday parties, cast parties from high school plays, arguments, laughter, first kisses, redecorations, and the multitude of events and non-events that make up a home. At one point an addition was built and I was allotted my own bedroom. The room was mine to do with as I pleased and I thought of it as my own mini-apartment, my first major experiment in autonomy. Even so, it was still inextricably part of that house, and therefore I considered as much home as the kitchen or the living room. The bedroom was no more mine than any of the other rooms.

After high school I moved to California. I came back after a year and home was still there, waiting. Some things had to be moved around a bit to accommodate me, but accommodate me they did and I was back. There were still get-togethers and some friends came over from time to time, but more often that not I went out to their houses. Home was no longer the center of activity, just the place to which I returned.

A few months later a friend of mine and I got an apartment. This place certainly wasn't home; it was more of a clubhouse that we got to stay in every night! We moved all of our things in and marveled at our independence. Everything was novel. Watching TV, cooking food, even cleaning- it was all different in our own place. Neither of us had had an extremely restrictive environment growing up, but it was still exciting to do all of these things on our own. And home, of course, was only a few blocks way. I visited frequently.

Life really started moving after that. There was Spain, of course- twice. Home wasn't even a thought anymore; life was all about everywhere else. My friend from the apartment moved on as well as he bought a house last year, just before I went back to Spain. When I returned from that adventure I arranged to rent a room from him. I'm still living there for now, until the next move or adventure or whatever it is one calls these great changes.

One of the greatest changes, however, occurred without my ever being aware of it. I still go to the house I grew up in every once in a while. Usually I chat a bit with my dad or my sister and then I leave. Tonight I arrived a half hour early and waited in that empty house for my dad to get home. No matter what I did, no matter what room I wandered into, I couldn't get comfortable. It was like reaching for a light switch instinctively and finding it always on the opposite wall; everything was a reminder that this house was not home any longer, at least not in the way it had been before. I thought about this for only a moment and decided- correctly, I believe- that most people probably feel that way at some point in their lives. It even felt satisfying, in a way. It was as if that experiment I started so long ago, moving furniture around in that added-on bedroom, was finally showing some results. At 23, after living with family in another state and essentially alone in another country, I'm finally starting to feel like I might actually be able to make it in the world. Not bad.

But then something else happened tonight. I walked into my bedroom tonight- the one rented from my friend- and suddenly realized that it isn't home, either. There are a few of my things here and there, but the walls surrounding them aren't mine. There will always be somebody on the other side of the door, somebody who does own the house and probably calls it home. But it's not my home: I'm a tenant, a transient.

The fact that this is not my home doesn't trouble me. I like my transience, and I'm always excited about where it will lead. But the question occurred to me: will any place ever feel like home again?