Home Has Never Been a Place

Image from Pexels.com, edited on Canva

An eternity has gone by since I last wrote anything meaningful, let alone post it. This blog, website, call it what you will, started out of pure joy and confidence only to descend into who-wants-to-read-it-anyway. Or is it just plain old boring laziness at play?

It's been 4 years in the US and time has flown. I recall gazing out of the Uber on that first drive from SFO to Sunnyvale, looking at a dreary landscape - boring, regular, mostly single-story buildings. Is this it, I thought. I expected the view to be more like Rome with its beautiful architecture.

But here I am. These boring single storied landscapes are now home. Looking out at the sunrise through the French windows, I'm thinking about what home has meant to me.

Home has always held a shifting identity. My childhood home - a small (but at that time my universe) one bedroom home. Two key memories. Rushing to my mother as she carried piping hot water with both hands - choosing that moment to give her a hug, and having that freshly boiled water pouring on me. Someone poured blue ink on me, perhaps my father? I have no memory of pain, no lasting burn scars - just this core memory. And the other of afternoons spent lying in bed, light filtering in from the window and watching the dust particles in that haze. I was never curious enough to know more about those particles, even as the question (what exactly is it?) has lingered in my mind for decades now.

We then moved to a home my father took on as a whole project and had it built on a plot of land. A huge garden surrounded our house - a fruit of my father's labor. I took great joy in watering the plants even as I probably grumbled about it. I recall spending weekend afternoons on a staircase, lost in my world. Burning my 'diaries' after someone read them; breaking my already fragile trust. Scaring the daylights out of my mother by lying on the edge of the terraced roof - I do not recall what led me to do that. I do recall I wasn't being angsty. I was peaceful lying like that under the night sky.

I see flashes of different homes through the years. The one we moved into during my years in college; just me and my father while my mother worked in a different city. I enjoyed that newfound independence of feeling like an adult and making my own decisions. A frog would visit my room occasionally and I remain disgusted by its slimy exterior.

A flatshare with a co-worker and another one with strangers who are now among my closest friends. I've shared multiple homes (and a whole life) with a permanent roommate - my spouse.

In my twenties, I liked to call myself a 'citizen of this world'. I had no idea what that meant. It nevertheless felt true to me. I believed it to mean that I would feel at home wherever in the world I went. This resonates with my thought of home as a shifting identity and why I could so easily name different places home.

Home has never been a place. I'm beginning to realise that my body is my home. In my mind, I'm constantly editing versions of me. They're born out of posturing and I'm no longer sure they feel true. My mind fills with a vision of that child running towards her mother, confident in asking for love. That's the feeling of home I'd love to hold on to.