Can you be homesick at home?

Home is a lot of things. Home is where the heart is, where you lay your head down at night, where your morning paper is delivered, where you're comfortable to walk around in undies and a huge tee-shirt, where you go after a long day to find a comfortable couch and television remote to take your brain away. For the past 22 years, home has been wherever those people on that raft drinking Red Stripe are. 

Home is something I'm not sure I'm comfortable talking about. I'll talk about the forbiddens - politics, religion, sex, books, sexuality. I'll tell you I'm a liberal democrat, who's totally okay in the contraceptive aisle of the drug store, who's favorite book is and always will be Catcher in the Rye, believes in peace through literacy and gay marriage. I won't judge you if you're a conservative republican who cringes at the thought of sex education, who loves a great Jane Austen manners novel, who sees the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman. But...ask me where I'm from? That's just not dinner table talk, dude. You just don't go there. 

Mostly because your eyes could get stuck in a rolled position. I'm going to tell you I'm from Providence, RI, Charlotte, NC, Forest Hill, MD, The Woodlands, TX, and Shepherdstown, WV. You'll learn how long I lived in each place and my justifications for calling each place my home. Sorry, it's a complicated subject. 

There's a certain beauty in growing up transient. One of the greatest benefits is the bond you form with your nuclear family, the people who are there in each packed and unpacked box and home walkthrough. I wouldn't change anything. I had no permanence, my grandparents didn't live a few blocks away and no one could point to a wall and see how much I had grown between ages 10 and 11. Honestly, it wasn't until middle school that I realized not everyone lived this way. 

People assume that, because of this, it was easy just to pack up the car and move on my own. Yes. Shepherdstown is more "home" in the traditional sense of the word than anyplace else, but those people in that picture weren't there for the move this time, and they're pretty far away. Bad days, during the Shepherd undergrad chapter could be cured with a few hours of driving and a home cooked meal with mom and dad. Those don't happen anymore, and Texas and West Virginia sometimes feel like they couldn't possibly be farther apart. 

So, sometimes, when I'm home, I get homesick. I know this is a part of being a 20-something. I understand. It's like moving from Easy Mac, to the old fashioned butter, milk and powdered cheese mac, to, I don't know, Osso Buco. 

The distance makes this right of passage easier. And, at the risk of sounding really teenage-y and emo...I wish people could understand that a little more. 

I miss my family today.