When you travel the world, to more countries than most people could name in a single sitting, where do you usually end up? Right back where you started for the majority of people I suppose. But why? I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t come from a life of luxury or live on our own tropical island, so why, why travel the world and see exotic places just to return to a boring little town where nothing has really changed since you left? Well, I’m sure that if you ask anyone who has done all of this, their first and probably only answer would be: I had to, it’s home.
So what, you go back to your “home” and sit in your house and feel all better? The answer is and well always should be, No. It is the people, not the place that makes a home. The people that know more about you than you do, the ones that make you feel lost without. Granted, you can meet a wide variety of individuals when traveling the world, many of whom would become your long distance friends, but they will never know about your 14th birthday party, or that time you fell on your butt trying to be cool, or how awful it felt to fail your history final. Those memories belong to your family and your life long friends, they are what makes home, home. “Where the heart is” blah blah blah.
So what happens when you all leave, say you all go to college and maybe only a few become townies and stay behind. Things are never really like they used to be. There is an empty spot in your life that just doesn’t seem to find a filler. Quite frankly, it’s not really home anymore. When you get older, say settled down in another state where you are currently making a living, hopefully a good one at that, and you travel back home for a holiday to visit the family. While you are driving around town and looking for an open food store and every spot you pass reminds you of a silly situation your friends got into when you were a teenager, you realize that this place isn’t really home anymore, because all you see is memories and in those memories, the people you consider “home” will always remain.
I was trying to imagine while reading your post what it would be like to go home next week and find that everyone I knew happened to be out of town. Sure I’d love being in a familiar atmosphere again where I don’t have to cary a map or strain my internal compass to get back to campus, but it would just be weird. And lonely. In fact, it would be more lonely than if I were just staying here because we really do connect places with people, and if the people I love weren’t at home … well, it wouldn’t really be home, now would it?
A great topic that is very fitting right before the Thanksgiving break. I feel as though the atmosphere around campus is that everybody is feeling a little anxious and homesick as we quickly approach our first real break. You did a great job of summarizing how your home is really where your loved ones are!