Transported Home

Isn’t it beautiful the way a mere four letter word has the ability to immediately transport you directly into a memory of you visiting your families home country for the first time. Just like that, you’re walking in another universe. The smell of fresh bread filling the air. The excitement in your bones as you get up to head to the market to gather things for your morning tea. Home seems to resonate differently in everyone’s soul, yet the word brings about a universal understanding. It isn’t only the place you rest your head. It can sometimes be the nothingness that feels you when you meditate. For some, it’s a location the strikes fear into your spine when anyone dares to remind you of a past you had thought was long since buried and forgotten. For others, it’s a person that loves you so deeply that a location doesn’t matter at all. Home can be in a motel, lying on a worn and beaten mat, waking up with nothing but pure happiness because you are entangled in the sheets with your lover- so you feel you are home anywhere you go. Home can be the feeling of divine love filling you up..the medicine that is endlessly fueling you. Home can be, the laughter from children as you push each other on the swings, on yet another sunny Sunday afternoon. Home can be your first kiss, your first pair of rollerblades, your first scar, your first tears over that boy who broke your heart. Home can be found everywhere and anywhere in the air particles surrounding you; because you just can’t seem to unpack your boxes and settle in one place for long. Home might be found in the movement. The flights to be had, the adventures you’ve yet to know. Home can smell just like vanilla extract, gingerbread, and pumpkin on a cool fall evening baking with those you love. Home might be something you had to create the meaning of within yourself, because you didn’t receive the stable foundation you should have. Home can be the love you hold in your heart, the energy you carry within you, always embracing others and creating space so they feel safe to find a home in you. Home might be the place some go only on Sunday’s for worship, but to you it holds the key to the world. Home is falling in love with your best friend and getting to be wrapped in their essence daily until eternity. Home might be the garden you spent every day after work tending to, because maybe it was easier to live in planting new seeds in soil, than to face what demons were lurking inside. Home for some, stereotypically could be a house built to ground your roots for decades to come. Generations of love, and first birthdays, and celebrations. Home for some might feel like destruction. Bad habits. Fear. And loss. Making a home out of the pain, and staying there thinking that is truly what home is. Finding this home in everyone you meet, only to later realize it wasn’t home at all. Home is the next foster place, and the next, and the next, not knowing when you will get your next meal or get to truly rest. Home for some is being born in a country where you’ve had to create the illusion for your children that the gunshots they hear are fireworks and that’s all you know it to be. Anything to take their fears away. Home is in your heart. Home is in the bonfires, wearing your favorite sweater on a chilly winter night. Home is in the October hay rides, and evenings better spent with belly laughs and slightly burnt marshmallows. Home is in the joy of carving pumpkins with your Dad, and baking the seeds, covering them in salt for a late night snack. Home is your grandmothers arms when you’ve got a heart that’s shattered. Home is your daughters strawberry blonde curls leading the way toward the gates. Home is found in the conversations you have with the moon. Home is the mirage you’ve had to create so that you could get up the next day. It’s okay. You did what you needed to to survive. Home is the scent of cinnamon rolls swirling and dancing around your nostrils, as your lover feeds you breakfast in bed. Home is your lips, the way you taste, your hand in mine. Home may be in the arms of an abusive lover, that you once saw the world in and lost it all. You kept looking for home in the hands of the wrong places and people, wondering where things went awry and what led you here. So you decide to take your power back and create your own. Home is an escape from all of the terror and chaos going on around you. The way you can so easily slip away from it all with the slam of a door. Home is something you may have to redefine and recreate to make sense of; so I decided that home is wherever I feel safe. Home is the way the sun beams across the trees just right, you take photographs in your mind. I define home as a feeling, as a taste, as a memory, moment in time, as the place you’re transported to; whatever you decide to create it to be in your mind. Home is the beauty in everything, in all of its endless forms. Isn’t it so inspiring the way you can make a home in anything? The way that even just her smile reminds me that I’m finally home.