Home

Home, by Chelsea Harris

Home.

A home isn’t four symmetrical sides that dignifies what love is inside the heart.

It’s always with me either in the best and worst ways.

It isn’t literal walls.

It’s the best metaphoric way to define the risk we take for love.

The price we pay for love!

Home isn’t residence, retreat maybe but it comes with pain and the glory.

It references almost everything from pride and faults, rises, and falls, values and losses, to true bliss and misery.

Pain and glory.

Home.

It’s been stripped and rebuild as long as I’ve been alive, and that sweet aroma of comfort and trust just gives a pleasure that nothing else can give.

It’s not just brotherly, sisterly, parental, friendly, or romantic.

It’s Familia.

But what happens when that home of love distorts into a hole?

When broken or lost?

When home loses its place in your heart, there’s heavy gravity of grief of that smile, laugher, refuge, protection, and limitless love that you shared with a special someone being gone.

Home may become a hole.

Still there, but with no barriers.

In a distance that may not be safe to retrieve.

Home isn’t just residence.

Home isn’t just fulfillment.

Home can be taken.

Home can be lost.

It can be broken.

It can be gone.

A hole.

When you build a foundation of security, belonging, and loyalty, you stitch up a blanket of covering.

Like a quilt.

Like a tapestry.

That is home.

Something your heart holds, not what you wear on your sleeve.

I have a home.

It’s been torn and resown.

Some pieces are lost, some broken and gone, but isn’t grief sorrow yet such a worthy price to pay for love?

I heard someone once say, “The only way to never feel pain is to never feel love and that’s not a life worth living.”

I’d do all the re-breaking a million times over for my home despite all the pain when there’s a heavy glory within.

Two types of gravity that either brings you up or holds you down and I’m getting by, by both.

I have grown because of this heavy warmth of love we call home and I have broke because of this heavy grief of pain we call holes, and the loss is such a worthy cost we pay for, for this thick fulfillment of sweet pleasure that’s not only gotten by brotherhood, sisterhood, parental love, romantic love, or friendship.

It’s so much more beyond that.

It doesn’t discriminate.

It’s not a hope to be desired.

It’s something we can either have and cherish or it’s something we still hold even though it’s distant.

Home is a state of being filled with a leaping love that’s always there; it just may not always be seen.

Home may not always be reliable or the warmth that we need sometimes but a home is surely something we shouldn’t dispense unless it distorts to something we’ve outgrown or something that has been strained.

But it will always have a part in who we are.

Home.

Home to me means heavy pain for a heavier glory that’s held in the heart from people we’ve put right beside us below surface.

Not residence.

Like a stethoscope that senses what’s not in sight.

Home.