It’s taken me twenty-two years but I think I finally do understand that you cannot go home again. It’s amazing what an impact that one small fact can have on your life ... how much one simple concept, the idea of home, can impact your choices and goals, your dreams for the future and the ones you have at night.
I wonder how much we idealize this concept of home – is it wise, to idolize this place to where you can never return? Not to get too philosophical but I wonder if that’s really what Heaven, Nirvana, The Summerland really is – just home – this perfect little vision of home that we all hold in our hearts and memories.
I haven’t felt like I’ve really had a home for several years now, but when I think about what home means for me, I think of it as a safe place. Some haven, a place to where we can retreat and just be ourselves and feel whatever it is we need to feel.
At twenty-two you can feel like all you are is emptiness and you spend half your time trying to figure out what exactly is in all that nothingness. There’s not being in your ideal career – not knowing what it is you want to do for the rest of your life; there’s not having your own place, or having a partner yet to share your life with; there’s not being pregnant and getting to share all the joy and pain that accompanies that miracle of carrying new life inside of you; and for many twenty-somethings there’s a loss of home.
You have a shelter, maybe you live with your family, you may even live in the same house you grew up in while you figure things out – but it really isn’t the same house at all. It’s not yours anymore and it never will be. Now you need to set out into the world and seek your own place, a place where you can settle down and build a home to call your own. And at twenty-two that seems like quite the daunting task, but I know now there’s comfort in that venture as well.
It’s true, you cannot go home again – but you can create a new home just for you.
