Where is home for you? What do you think of? Childhood? Family? Where you live now? A long lost place?
There will be a pivotal place and memory, and most likely it will be embedded in childhood. Your childhood home. Even if you only spent a few years there, even if you have spent more time not being there, it will still resonate. Maybe you still live there or your parents still live there. But maybe its gone. If you have a family now, children and a wife, maybe that's your home.
You may live in a house, or flat, or mobile home or nowhere. Are these homes? Or just places you go back to at the end of the day. There is a difference.
Is it a permanent location, or is transient. Do you own it, or does someone else? Does it make a difference, do you have to be financially invested in a place to be calling it at home? Or is it a feeling?
If you have no home where are you returning to? Where is the hobo going? The eternal search for that place, running away is one thing, but where are you running too?
So many questions to answer the most simplest of questions. Because the first image you had in your mind when you read the word 'home'is the answer. That's what it means to you. The safe place, the comfortable place, the place you are attached to. That is the place you call home. And most likely that image wasn't an empty building, it wasn't a frozen statue, there were other people there. An emotional and psychological connection not only to a geographic location, it must be more, the sense of a place.
If there was no childhood home, then what? Or it wasn't what it should have been, so there is a lifetime of looking and building that place.
Search engines are prosaic, type in 'home' and the question is 'where is home', it wants a postcode and an address. It will list properties, the physical structure.
But home is not the building, its not a co-ordinate. It's the people in it. It's the memories that it formed.
Hometowns. Are they the towns you were born in? The town you grew up in? The town you now live in? All three could be the same place or they could all be different. You could live and die in the same city, or you leave it the day you were born. How do you define it, how do you define yourself. You are not the place, but so many people define themselves by this.
The town I was born in is one of the biggest and one of the most famous. Its an old town. Most people who live there moved there, not born there. The constant flow, migration, everyone looking for a future.
The town I was born in is not the one I mostly grew up in. The town I live in now, I'm not sure how I how even got here. I had no connection with it, there was no plan. But connections are made. You connect with the landscape, you connect with the people. Or you just grow accustomed to a place and a way of life.
You already know what home means to you. You carry it with you wherever you go. You are always returning home.
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| Homes or just buildings? |
