Home

“Get me the fuck out of here.”
is what I’m currently, quietly screaming inside my head.

I wonder if this wanderlust will ever disappear.
I’m never happy in one place for too long. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever be happy in one place. I actually have a legitimate concern – that I can’t be happy in one place. You know how financial troubles, academic woes, and relationship drama can keep people up at nights? The fact that I can’t be happy in one place to me? Is what financial troubles, academic woes, and relationship dramas is to other people…. Analogies anyone? – No? Forget it.

This feeling of restlessness? Boredom?... Disgust? - at times. With any one place at any given time. Anxiety… that I’m at the wrong place, at the wrong time. What am I doing here? With my life? BREATHE. I should be somewhere else. Not here. Not there. Maybe, not anywhere. Life moves too quickly, too slowly -- why am I not home?

What is home? Define home. A convenient place to direct your mail? A convenient street number to write down on your financial aid forms, tax documents, and all things legitimate, official, centralized, stamped, sealed, tucked away in a dull grey file cabinet, bureaucratic, governmental, and entirely unnecessary. A necessity for a license and all things fun -- like that blue, sort of battered, matte-finished passport I own.

You can’t just exist. You need a number, you need a place. You need to belong. To somewhere. Anywhere.

As it turns out, we don’t own places, they own us. You’re strapped to that information. You live in the United States. You ARE a US citizen. Try to deny it. Just try it. You want to live somewhere else? What? You want to just pick up and live in Italy? Ireland? Where the hell is Maldives? Tonga cannot fucking exist. Timbucktoo for all I care. That’s not how you spell it? Oh, really. Well you can’t live there anyway. The middle of no where Mongolia? Good luck. Paperwork, red tape, embassies, visas, passports, interviews... God, help me. I can't just say I'm home when I feel like it?

You think you can just exist? Just wander? Just travel the world? Someone, somewhere, needs to know where you are. Well… what the fuck, I don’t feel like having a place today. Can’t I stand at any given place in this world, at any given time, and just declare “I belong here. THIS is home.” – without someone asking me for a document to prove it?

I don’t own a place. Why do I need to write my “permanent address”?
Lie. Yes, folks -- they’re telling me to lie. At this age, how the hell could I have a “permanent address”? What do I write down? My parent’s house. But, I’m hardly ever there. Maybe one out of four months of the year I live there. Not even. This year, I’ll be there for less than 50 days out of 365 days of the year (it’s not a leap year right?) My parent’s house. It’s not home. For me at least – it’s not home.

Home? You mean that room that is now my little brother’s?
Home? The couch that I sleep on in the living room when I get back to my four bedroom house?
Home? It sure as hell isn’t *insert town, state* -- because for the last three years, I’ve spent more time at my dormitory room in Delaware than I have at that address. I love my family, but the place we live, doesn’t feel like home. It’s not a part of us. I could take my family members to China with me, and not miss that small, cramped, and entirely too messy house.
Home? It used to be where my heart is. But now my heart feels like a ship at sea, without a lighthouse to guide it safely to shore. Yeah, you can sue me for that last bit. I agree, it warranted a bit of vomit.
Home? It can’t possibly be China. It can’t possibly be a country. I just want one place – to stay for an extended period of time. To decorate. To own. For my personality to permeate into the room. For others to walk into the room and think "This is definitely her place -- just look at it".
Home? It's a place where my things belong. So I don't have to move all my stuff every other month, lose favorite shirts in the process and re-alert my school where I will be staying for the year. It's a place where I belong.

I have feelings of longing. For a place that doesn’t exist. It exists in my mind as a fairytale. I want to put down roots. I want to come back to a space that’s my own. I want to know that it exists. That the little I own, when I come “home”, will be where I left it. Not stuffed away by my mother in the attic until I move into another dorm, another place, another temporary existence. I want picture frames to collect dust, music CDs to still be sprawled on the floor, the quilt as I left it on the couch, and the slight smell of flowers to fill the air when I bring white lilies home to freshen up the place.

Fuck. Someone tell me where home is.