Home is where the heart is.

It's reposting, but this is a busy time of year for me and if I can't write something original, I can at least give you something appropos.

There's a quiet in the suburbs that doesn't exist in the city.

When I stepped outside onto the snowy folds of my parents' back deck last night, I noticed it.

It's remarkable, the calm. Maybe that's why I go back so often. There's a peace of mind this place gives me that nothing else can.

When my world starts getting a little fuzzy around the edges and I feel like at any moment my heels could slip off the ledge, I pack up some stuff, take to the Kennedy and go home.

My mom always scolds me every time I leave her place and say, "I'm going home." She says,

"No. You ARE home. This is your home. THAT'S your apartment."
She's right.

I am home here.

And that's something I didn't really value until my twenty-eighth year on this Earth.

Shame on me.

Yesterday night I came home to find an empty house; no one else was there. I like it this way. I imagine having my own house one day, big and open all around me, sheltering and defining. The spaces of my parents' house are intimate and familiar. Each corner my own. Each creak of the walls and moan of the stairs predictable under my feet.

And that's a safe feeling.

Because when it comes down to it, that's what we all want. To feel safe. And accepted.

Life doesn't always give us these opportunities to fit somewhere so perfectly.

I walked out onto the back deck last night and breathed in deep. The only sound for miles, my own breath.

Home.

When you're away from home for two weeks, you return to what seems like this altered state of reality. Everyone you left before you went away went on doing whatever they did before you left. They washed dishes, had conversations, sang along to the radio in the car, went on walks. And I am left wondering in my hotel room if I am important enough to be thought of once in a while.

After I washed the warm, thin desert air from my hair and took off the face I painted on before I left Arizona, I felt odd. Uncomfortable. Unsettled and uneasy in my own home.

I wonder what it is, this strange adjustment to a life I, oftentimes, don't feel connected to.

Eh.

Have you ever had the feeling that you *just don't want to go home*?

I've been sitting here, essentially finished with everything I needed to get done today. But for some reason I just don't want to turn my computer off, ride the elevator down to the lobby, walk to my car, get in and drive home.

Maybe it's because soon it won't be my home anymore and I'll have yet another home to populate with things and pictures and sounds to make it feel like I am supposed to be there. But in the end, I don't really. Feel like I am supposed to be there.

My home was a feeling I lost some time ago and I can't seem to find a replacement.
It scurries across the pages of books and floats above the memory of places I've been but I can't catch it. It makes it's way through my nervous system like the vibration of a window with a passing train. I remember what it feels like but it's just out of reach.

And now, it seems these cookie cutter surroundings of this anytown u.s.a. office lump me in with the rest of the complacent. Indifferent. My generation that assumes a thousand faces that borrow my own.

And I just don't want to go home.

I took the road less traveled by.

So this weekend I was over at my parent's house doing odds and ends, setting up my mom's wireless router, etc. and I decided to take the long way home for a change.

The long way is not that impressive, just a maze of side streets and raised ranch houses, amidst a flurry of parks named after trees. Oak, Maple, Willow.

These are streets I grew up on, walked home from elementary school and junior high on, had my childhood bumps and bruises on.

Somewhere in between those streets and parks and childhood stumbles, I grew up.

But not really.

I am a shade over twenty-seven and I don't feel a shadow over seventeen. I still go over to my parent's house to do laundry and borrow money from my dad. I buy my toothpaste at the Dollar Store and overdraw my checking account. I don't pick up after myself and I leave food in the fridge past its date.

Somewhere in between the rent payments, Roth IRAs, and paying my student loans, I grew up.

Had to.

But not really.