This is a post I wrote a few weeks ago but never hit the publish button on. Even now that I’m starting to settle back in (I have, in fact, unpacked), I still feel the tug of my other homes and miss them.
Over the course of the past two years my life has become a series of packing and unpacking. Boxes and suitcases and closets. I pack in them my clothes, my shoes, all my favorite decorations and trinkets, oftentimes, my emotions, and my sense of home. In just two years I’ve called four different cities and five different places within them my “home.”
Home used to be Houston. I knew the house I grew up in as “home,” and had never called another place my home and meant it. Sure, I called camp “my home away from home,” but that didn’t have the same sense of ownership and mine was to it. I shared that, so I didn’t feel like I could call it mine only, and I probably wouldn’t have said, “I’m going home for the summer.” Nowadays I say things like that all the time, but I have to clarify which home I’m referring to.
I moved out of my home in Houston August of 2012, and home has been in a constant state of flux ever since. I called my freshman dorm home and it stuck, even when I returned to Houston for Christmas I was calling and texting my friends from college talking about when we’d be “home.” And it was home, but not just because my stuff was there. Nashville became home because I made another family there, and that’s where I began to hang my heart at the end of the day.
Then, that summer I went back to my family home in France for my ninth visit, and started calling that home too. I don’t know what in particular was different about that summer, because I’ve been many summers before, but I felt like I belonged. I rode my bike all over kingdom come, covering all the farmland around the village our little house sits in. I learned the patterns of the sun and watched the sunsets over the wheat fields like it was my job, and then nestled into bed at night with my books feeling exactly what it meant to be home. Last summer I invested more than a vacation in that little house because when I went to close up my room and tucked the sheets for my bed back in the linens closet to keep for next time, I tucked a little piece of my heart right in there between my white pillow case and pink sheets, and felt sad to leave home.
I moved into another dorm shortly after that, calling Nashville home for another year, and then moved out again after what felt like the blink of an eye. When I packed up my stuff, though, this time was different. I sorted my things into four piles: things for storage in Nashville, things to be taken back to Houston, things I’d want to pack for my eventual move to France (this fall), and things to take to Africa. Not only was that as stressful as it sounds, but my heart felt like it was just pulling in all directions because (though I didn’t know it yet) all of those places are my homes, and I have family in all of them, but while I’m excited to move to one new home for a new adventure, I’m always sad to leave another behind.
Home is a hard word to define. I made friends and family so dear and set up a home and a life (for however short a time) in Kenya, and had to leave to come back to an older home. I now sit in my room back in Houston surrounded by boxes and bags and an overflowing suitcase and wonder whether to unpack or not. I’m home in every sense of the word, living with my biological family, in the room I grew up in, surrounded by love and all my things, but parts of my heart have been strewn across the globe and I don’t know which one is my real home anymore. Maybe all of them.
I think home has become something very relative. It’s where I spend my time, invest my love, and put stock in. It’s where my family is, both biological and chosen, and where my hopes lie. Home is a hard thing to define, but I guess, for now anyway, home is wherever I am.
The Transition Artist 