Home.
We’ve been taught a pretty linear view of what a home is. Most people would define it as a house with
walls and a roof. That is until you start thinking about it a little deeper. I’ve always lived in the same
house until I moved to the United States to study at UC Berkeley. But for some reason, I never quite felt really
at home. I for sure felt good; I had my room, food on the table and my family. But that’s not where I
felt the best. And it made me feel guilty. For a long time, I tried to bury my head in the sand. I just
thought that this was what home felt like when in reality, it was not.
Home.
It’s where you truly feel yourself from within. Home is where you let everything go. It’s the place
where you could stay for hours on end, then glance at your phone and realize that time has passed
but you didn’t notice a second go by. Home is that one place where nothing feels more
comfortable: It’s that quote-on-quote “safe place” where you can unleash what you’ve kept
inside for so long. It’s where you give in to your thoughts and let them flow. Or it’s that place where you
simply don’t think; where you don’t even have to think. It feels natural.
Home.
In opposition to what many of us grew up thinking, home is not always a house. It’s much more than that. It
can be so many different things: Why reduce it to walls and a roof? Home can be a person. It can
be that one human being who makes you laugh out loud until you eventually can feel that yes, you
do have abs. It can be a scent. That one scent that makes all the muscles in your body relax. That one
scent that revives the best memories treasured away in your head. It can be a place. That tree you
like to climb on. That bench you always sit on to read (romanticize your life as they say). That one table
at the library that they should have engraved your name on by now.
It can be a sound, like music. A voice. That one sound that makes you fly away, that has this superpower to remove all those thoughts that scream in your head (like a dementor would do to your soul), or on the contrary, that
one song that puts into words all those unexplainable things you have in your mind. Or that one sound,
that voice, that is like music to your ears, the one you could never get tired of. Not even in a million
years. Home could even be a TV Show, a book character, a color, an action or your kitchen. A dream
even.
Home.
It could even be all of those things at once. Deep down I think that life is all about building your
home. Not in a literal sense, with brigs and cement, but with time, trials and life experiences. The
more you grow, the closer you get to finding out what it means for you. What the definition of home is in your dictionary. Life is your playground. Make it yours. Make it your
Home.