When Is A House, A Home?

Home is such an elusive concept.  Trying to define the word runs the gambit from your mother country to your adopted land, from the place you grew up to the place where you put down roots, from a mere place to store your belongings to a sacred, nearly mythical place.  What everyday magic occurs when you cross your own threshold?  Entering your home allows you to turn and to close the door on the chaos of the world, making a declaration that of all the miles upon the Earth, this tiny spot is completely unique, for unlike all other places, this one is yours.

Nowhere else can you lay claim, like the claim you can lay to your home.  While blueprints can show exact dimensions, carpet can cover carefully measured square footage, and feature listings can read of crown molding and granite countertops like a resume, these things do not make up the essence of home.  Your home is an extension of self, ego suffused into the smooth rills of the plaster, soaked into the porous chalk of the drywall, permeating down to the foundation beneath your feet.

This concept was not innate within me.  I do not know if I can say I knew what a home was before my father welcomed me into his.  Upon leaving his house, my first home, I have only lived in four places.  I lived in the same apartment my entire college career, my first apartment out of school was my sanctuary for ten years, the duplex might have been my last address because it suited me so well, had I not decided to change every line of my address label sans my name, and finally my current apartment.

Each place I was hesitant to leave because of how much I put of myself into them.  My mere presence in them deemed them to be safe, a place where I did not have to explain myself to the world.  My memories existed in ever door handle, paint scrape, and carpet stain.  Sentiments of the life I had lived while outside the walls and the safe haven they were inside those walls endeared each to my heart.  The love I gave, the heartache I endured, the mistakes I made all were inseparable from that space that each set of four walls provided me.

Leaving each was like closing a chapter on my life.  After all the boxes were gone, all the cabinets empty, and the place cleaned for the next one who will call it home, I would take a moment by myself to walk through, and recall all that had happened there.  Who I was when I came, and who I was when I left.  My footsteps would echo emptiness mirroring my feeling inside, like I was losing a friend.

Soon it will be this place that I walk alone through.  I have decided to buy a house and make myself a more permeant home than I perhaps have ever had.  I wonder what I will see through those eyes as I close this chapter of my life.  I hope I will see the bravery it took for me to take a leap of faith with a cross country move in hopes of making my life better.  I am sure I will see the amazing people who have come into my life and have given me more courage to just be myself than anyone ever has before.  I pray I will see all the love and acceptance I have given to those around me.  And above all, I hope I will see that I left a better person than the one who first walked through that door, into a place that I now call home.