2. Home

I’d argue that if there is one single universal human experience, it’s the desire to be home. Home can look like so many things, which is why I feel comfortable making such a claim. A person or group that feels like home, a specific hiking trail, a coffee shop, getting into the zone of a sport you’ve devoted your life to, poetry, or, - and hear me out here - a house. The ability to feel familiar is an elusive concept that I’ve struggled with since I was 17. Almost 10 years ago after a particularly violent screaming match with my father, and after hearing “it’s you or me, and this is my house” from him, I found myself living out of a duffel bag at my friend Jeff’s house. Junior year of high school is a wild time to start thinking about how to go through the day-to-day by yourself, especially when you’ve only known life in an upper-middle-class, 3-meals-a-day, church-every-Sunday family. I can’t ever fully realize how privileged I am to have felt so comfortable for the first 17 years of my life, but after this everything just became a little more scary, and thus began my search for home in different places.

Is there a word for homes that aren't quite home? 

Since then, drawers have become a thing of the past. My brain was actively developing when I learned that you don’t need many clothes or much furniture to exist, and that made me pretty mobile. In college I never fully unpacked, and packing up to move again just looked like throwing things in trash bags and either dropping them in the dumpster or trashing them. I still have a fundamental problem with using drawers, and if I use one I’ll forget about what I put there until it’s time to move. No drawers made it easy to live in a van for a while. No drawers make it easy to follow the other things I want to do, they made it easy to move to Colorado. They’ll make it easy to move to the next place, and no drawers make it easy for that next place to be somewhere I want it to be. 

But if I don’t need drawers, what else don’t I need? 

This concept has been at the forefront of my mind because a rather large milestone just happened: I’ve officially lived in one house longer than any place since I hurriedly packed a duffel bag and closed the door on my childhood home behind me halfway through high school. And honestly, it feels like it’s time to go. Nothing has changed, but my internal alarm clock is ringing. 

This begs the question: will the alarm clock stop? 

Is home just the concept of home? Maybe yes, but right now I guess it’s never here. 

"Home is that house you no longer live in. Home is before, and you live in after." -John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet