Sometimes I think to myself that I just want to run away. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in my own living room, surrounded by all the things that comprise my life, and wish that I could go home. Where is home? Don’t I have one? Haven’t I been there before?

Sure, I don’t consider this single-bathroom joint me and my husband are renting in Pittsburgh our home. We still haven’t nailed up pictures and there’s a perpetual unpacked box sitting beneath my bedroom mirror. You get the idea. It’s a house, not a home. Home is on a hill in West Virginia where the windows are open all summer and a fire snapping all winter. Home is deep into those woods, deliciously quiet on a sunny day. Reminiscent and secretive on those rainy ones.

But sometimes I’m even sitting there, in the same arm chair by the window where my father used to read The Chronicle of Narnia aloud. Or I’m in the same kitchen where my mother has pulled hot rolls from the oven for two decades. I’m even at the Kohler & Campbell piano, the natural odor of the wood under my nose. And despite all of those things, the wondrous familiarity, I can be physically present and still be interrupted by the thought – I want to go home. I just want to go home. 

And I don’t even understand what I mean. Home is some indefinable, nebulous place that I want so much to be physical. I want to feel the smoothness of the walls, the hardwoods beneath my feet, warm wind through the open window. Bread in my oven. Laughter in my kitchen. More than that, I want a feeling. Wholeness and lightness. All forms of lightness – both sunshine and the absence of weight.

I miss the people in that house. The sisters at the piano. The dad on the front bench in the evening, drinking Sleepy Time tea and surveying the long stretch of yard. The mother hanging fresh sheets on the back deck.   

I miss being twelve and running barefoot. I miss having fifteen library books on my dresser at once and two novels started on the computer. I miss long hours shooting basketball in the driveway. The leather sliding through my hands and stories ideas going round and round in my head. 

Are those things home? Or are those feelings home? 

In that sense, maybe Home is not only someplace I’ve been, but something I can take with me. Those feelings of peace and happiness resting dormant somewhere inside of me. But are those feelings merely asleep or have they died? How do we recreate the weightlessness of childhood? 

In adulthood, my eyes are open. I feel the length of the road, the miles to trek before I sleep. My heart winces at the splinter of dawn, dreading the moment the covers are pulled back and I step onto the road once again. The charm of life was dropped like a trinket long ago. 

If I were to ask you, where is Home? Is it buried in those memories of childhood? Perhaps it is left behind with the people you have lost. Is Home in the sound of someone’s voice? If that’s true, then Home is lost forever, and no amount of conjure, no game of tricks, could ever reproduce it again. 

Perhaps you have never really been Home. For you, it’s an idea, a concept. Home is a theory you’re working on and someday you hope to finish the thesis. It’s built through a thousand thoughts – part memory and part vision. But mostly just hope. 

But what if maybe, just maybe, Home is not a place you could ever stumble across on this side of the woods. It’s not waiting behind the veil of trees or at the top of the mountain. What if Home is immaterial but more substantial than feeling? The place your soul belongs. A place with God. The place where you were created and understood and loved. 

Regardless, I will continue to fall asleep in my own bed and be awakened by the desire to go Home. I will close my eyes and still yearn for lightness – both sunshine and the absence of weight. The childhood is gone. Their voices have fallen silent. But I could create another Home, in another place and time, with other people. And so I turn onto my side in the growing darkness and I listen to the steady breathing of my husband as he sleeps. And there, safe and warm, I dream about Home.  

10/15/2018