I Want To Go Home
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Journey, Home, Life, Homesickness, Heartstrings

Home. They say it’s where the heart is. I’ve often heard, ‘home is wherever you are’, or ‘it doesn’t matter where we live as long as I’m with you’. Hopelessly romantic. Foolish. If those statements were true – if we could really be ‘home’ anywhere just as long as we were with our own true love…then why do we get homesick? Why do we long for home — home being where we grew up? Where we can walk all the streets with our eyes closed and still get where we’re going.

You can live pretty much anywhere. I’m not even 40 yet, and I’ve had 37 homes in my lifetime (So far — I know I’m not done yet) — I just counted. And no, I don’t hate where I live now. I actually quite like this crappy little house with the massive yard and covered front porch where I can sit in almost any weather — it’s where I’m sitting right now as I write these words. I’ve even used the word ‘love’ once or twice. “I love it here.”

Love. Hate. Both words are often used out of context — overly dramatic. Do I genuinely love it here? No. I love aspects of here. Like this porch. But it’s not because the porch is attached to this particular house in this particular town. It’s the feeling it gives me that I love. The perceived freedom from the constricting walls inside.

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us we can find again only by going back there.” – Pascal Mercier; Night Train to Lisbon

I just came back from my hometown for the fourth time this summer. The most I’ve visited in any one season in seventeen years. It’s been less than 24 hours since I’m back, and already I miss it. I missed it before I even got in the car to leave. Every time I come back, I miss it more. I’m homesick.

The heart is where the home is.

I’m realizing more and more, the older I get, that home really is where the heart is – or the heart, really, is where home is. What I mean is that wherever I am in the world — wherever my current residence is — my heart remains there. In my hometown. Though it beats physically inside my chest, it’s merely going through the motions until I’m back home. The home it knows. The home it feels. The home where it belongs – where I belong – where it waits for me.

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.” – Ransom Riggs; Miss Peregrine’s Home For Particular Children

I couldn’t wait to leave, as a kid. To escape – see the world. Live in amazing and wonderful places. Meet inspiring and successful people – become one of those people, perhaps. “I’ll come back to visit”, I would say, “but never to live.” It was the place where dreams died, or never saw the light of day. Where old people went to retire. Now, I want nothing more than to ‘come back to live.’

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” – Noel Langley; The Wizard of Oz

If you live away from home, have you noticed the subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — changes in yourself when you come back to visit? When you see all of the familiar places. When your feet walk the familiar streets.

Do you feel like a piece of yourself that mostly remains quiet — dormant — suddenly awakens and becomes alive again inside of you? When you breathe the air, and although there’s really no distinctive scent, it smells like home. And you feel like you’re finally able to be you again.

But the old you is imperceptibly melded with the new you — the you that’s grown throughout the years of being away. And you notice the changes, in yourself and in others, and in the place itself. You notice them, but as much as you can resent them, (How dare they tear down your first school to put in a soccer field nobody ever uses!?) you also revel in all that’s stayed the same.

The town — just like you — has remained the same in all the ways that count, and yet has also changed and grown in so many ways. It’s still home, and you’re still you, now — here — more than ever.

In ways, it’s like time has slowed — not stopped fully, because that never happens. It isn’t Stepford. But slowed. Waiting for you to return.

And every single time you do, you find your missing pieces again. And every time you leave, you leave them all behind again once more. In a safe little box, you tuck them away carefully.

And there they stay, patiently waiting for the next time – hoping silently that the next time will be the time. The time when you come back for a visit, and decide you’re home to stay this time.

The time when you come home because that’s where your heart is.

I want to go home.