'Cause They Say Home is Where Your Heart is Set in Stone: Going Home

When you really think about it, going home is a really vague idea. It isn't necessarily the act of leaving a place and going to a physical house, although it can be. More often it can be going to be where your family is, and sometimes it just means to your hometown or your home state. And sometimes it means returning to the place you love, or the person; sometimes it's just an emotional home. It really ultimately comes down to you alone.

For me, I have many different "homes". The house that I lived in from the time I was born until just a few months ago, where I saw my family change from a family of six to two girls after tragedy, to three with a new marriage and to four with my sister's birth, back to three after divorce and now to just my mother and my sister after I moved out. That is my home as I will always know it, it's my place I can always go back to.

I've lived in only three cities in my life: my hometown, my college town, and the city where I studied abroad. Royal Oak, East Lansing, and Dublin. Three apartments, three dorms, one house. All homes in some way. All memories and fondness when thinking about them. They were all a place I referred to at the end of the night when I said "I'm going home" and the place where I laid my head at night for months or years of my life. These are physical and emotional places I called home.

My home today is an apartment just one mile away from my mom's house. Just this week I was at her house and told her I was going to go home. That's the first time in the three months that I haven't lived with her, that I've said "home" instead of "my apartment". The next day I changed my address on my driver's license to my actual address, at my apartment, where I now go home to.

Actually feeling at home is weird. Feeling like this place is your own, feeling comfortable to be there at all times, feeling welcomed and wanted by a space. It takes time, and it's weird when a new place becomes your home and you're forever connected to that place. Any house can be a house to a person, a shelter and a place to live your life, but a house becoming a home is completely different. That emotional security of a place or a person or of a group, that makes somewhere/something your home.

Why am I writing this? Months ago I wrote out goals for myself at 23, and one of those goals was to leave the country within the next year. Well I have plans to "go home" at the end of my 23. The arrangements have been discussed and the goals for ticket buying have been set in place. I'm going home, to a place that I have called home and that I emotionally feel is one of my homes, home to Dublin to spend the last of my 23rd year and to start my 24th in. I am over the moon with the possibilities this trip has in store, and staying with my friend will make it all the more enjoyable. I'll keep you updated on this as it develops into physical results.

I've been all about song lyrics for my titles lately, here's the song that inspired this one (I used to play this on my drive home from college). Also, two days in a row of posts! Unheard of for Slow Runners Club.

"Home" -Gabrielle Aplin

Until next time,

-J