Home Is Where the 'What' Is?

I often think about what “home” is supposed to feel like. Does it feel like a bedroom in a house in the middle of a cul-de-sac where you snuck your first boyfriend in through a small window? Is it like a sidewalk on a suburban street where you carved your cursive name in freshly poured cement? Or maybe it sounds like the creaks in the wooden ladder that lead to the attic where you snooped out your Christmas gifts year after year. Whatever it is that home “supposed” to feel like, I haven’t felt that in years.

I was 16 years old the first time I lost everything. My family had just gone through a lengthy legal process to prevent this very thing from happening, but inevitably it did. Imagine an entire lifetime of physical memories wiped away in an instant. From then on, my parents and their 4 antsy preteens began a rocky road of resettling. No friend or location was safe from the perils of perpetual uprooting. My life became a revolving door of newness.

The second time I lost it all (Yes. It happened twice.), I was a 25-year-old, Texas-Florida transplant, fresh off of the heels of the most taxing year of my young adult life. Over the course of 9 months, I’d lost all of my worldly possessions, my fiancé, my closest confidant, and what seemed like my self-respect in the process. There I was standing in the middle of Miami International Airport, going back home to my family, with nothing to show for my recent journey.

It’s been more than half a decade since that day at Miami international. I moved to NYC not long after being literally and figuratively depleted, my best friend and I made up within months of our breakup, and my ex fiancé and I shared a spliff and a cheap bottle of champagne over Christmas last year. I’ve filled my Brooklyn home with a bunch of shit new and old, none of which I’m afraid to lose because I’m cognizant of the fact that belongings are just extensions of my insecurities.

I don’t have a childhood home to visit when I need to escape New York or a personalized blanket that my mom keeps tucked away only to bring out and embarrassingly show my future partner (when I finally bring someone home to meet her) but I have vivid memories and the character that my childhood built. I will never forget the smell of freshly poured cement, and sometimes, when I’m really down, I reminisce on the joy I felt after climbing the creaky wooden ladder that lead to the attic which held all of my wildest dreams in the form of Easy Bake Ovens and Gigapets every December. That must be what home feels like.