Home(less)?

Since I have recently uprooted 1600 miles from Corpus I have been musing a lot about what home means to me. Home for most of my life was the house I grew up in, surrounded by my family and friends I had known since 2nd grade. It may have been bitterly cold outside at times in the North Star State, but it was always warm at home. Even as I moved away to college and to graduate school, that stucco house remained home to me. Sure I made friends and enjoyed the places I lived, but I couldn't shake that my roots remained firmly planted on Livingston St. But then my sister was killed unexpectedly in a car accident at 38, and my dad followed a year later after a massive heart attack. Suddenly home represented bittersweet memories I couldn't face, and an emptiness time couldn't fill.

In a strange coincidence, I had closed on my first house in Corpus the day my sister died, and all I could think about at the time was that it would never feel like home. For almost 3 years it didn't feel like home, nowhere did. But then life snuck up on me, I formed deep friendships and even fell in love. My house was no longer just a structure, it hosted parties with all my friends, became a refuge from the winter for my family, and I realized you could get a good idea of who I was just by looking at the house and yard and all it contained. It was home, how did it become home without me realizing?

And then I did something I don't even completely understand myself. I moved out East, 1600 miles away from home. Sure it was a fantastic job, a great career opportunity, and a chance to live in a vibrant big city again, but for a girl who had spent the last 4 years wandering emotionally while staying put physically, it seems a strange decision. I left my friends, my boyfriend, my home all behind. So will this new place become home?One night, while unpacking, I was listening to the Boss, and I was struck by something he says. "It's a sad man my friend, who is living in his own skin, and can't stand the company." The Boss, I thought, knows what home is. Home is whenever you feel comfortable in your own skin, it is not a time or even a place. It is neither dependent on your friends or your family, but entirely on you. And that is why I had moved. I had found refuge in my friends and my life in Corpus, had tried to let their love fill the hole inside me, but after all this time it was still there. So here I am, "homeless" for now, but determined to feel at home in my own skin once and for all so that I will be at "home" wherever life takes me. Wish me luck!