You could ask a hundred people to tell you what "home" means to them and you would likely get a hundred different answers. For most of us, home is that place where we are most comfortable, where we can be ourselves, where we don't have to worry about what others think or want us to do. Home is our haven. As children, home was likely to be our sanctuary - the place where we learned our best and worst lessons and it didn't matter because everyone there loved you anyway. As we grow up, there is a time when home becomes the place you want to leave and never look back. And then we do that and realize that there really is no place like home.
I remember the first time I went home after I had lived out on my own in Chicago for a few years. I couldn't afford to get my own apartment right way so I ended up living with my mom again. That first night I was laying in there in the same bed I had slept in, in the same room I had called my own, with the same pictures on the wall. It was like I had travelled back in time. It was weird but somehow really great at the same time. I felt trapped but free, nostalgic but liberated, all at the same time. I came to appreciate home in terms of my own definition. Home was a place I will always remember and have some really wonderful recollections of it but I wouldn't want to live there again.
It's hard to say good bye to the physical place you call home. The memory keeper in all of us would rather tie it up in a bow and stop time to keep those memories in tact and whole. But the truth is, memories become sweeter when we let them mingle in the presence of our days not when we hold them so close they start to smother us.
