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i have this ideal visualization of home, i’ve had it since second grade. i remember having my first panic attack crying to my mom and begging to just go home, and she was completely confused because i was sitting in the hallway of our house begging for her to take me home when i was, clearly, at home.

now as i’ve gotten older, eleven years after my first cry for home, i still beg (though less drastically) to go home every once in awhile. in this moment home is not my house in my hometown, nor is it my room at my college. home is that car ride with a best friend, ending in the middle of nowhere to just open a sunroof and listen to acid tongue by jenny lewis, home is a place where you can just absorb the fact that you are LIVING, and that it’s a MIRACLE to just exist. the world is more complex than i can fathom, and knowing that everything is happening around me is just such an extraordinary feeling that i can’t even grasp a sliver of it’s extent, and if i just graze that feeling it lifts me up, and brings me home. 

a house is not a home. the people within the house make the home. my parents make the house my home, my brother makes his house my home, my sisters here at my college make our house my home, my friends make their houses my home. experiences and life in general make cars, movie theaters, malls, cornfields, lakes, anything, my home. a home is a feeling, not a foundation.

at least that’s how it seems to me.