I want to go home

Today, I want to write about the feeling of being home.

Home could mean a lot of things to different people. For some, home might be a significant other or a spouse. I’ve gone through that phase of life before, the one where home is wherever that person is with you.

 

That could mean western Kansas, Wichita, Oklahoma City or Kansas City. Or wherever you travel to with your person.

 

To some people, home is a person.

 

I am currently not in that phase of life.

 

For others, home could also mean the house that you grew up. For me, that place doesn’t feel like home anymore. Yes, it’s where I grew up, but I know that I’m not ever going to live in that house again. Every time I go there, it’s for a day or two, until I pack my bag and leave.

 

Right now, the idea of home for me is my hometown. Home, for me, is a few square miles, the roads that I used to drive as a teenager. The same roads that I drive now were the roads that I wished and prayed, hoped and wished to just leave behind one day forever.

 

When I go home now, I drive past the same things. I take a little drive and go past my childhood house, the grade school that’s no longer there, the old folks home I used to walk past on the way to school, my other grade school and middle school, my old house that I sold, my church and high school (along with other things in town).

I think I’ve reach an age (36) where home is no longer a physical place. The idea of home becomes this thing, this feeling, this emotion that you get when you visit it.

 

I lived in my hometown for 10 years, up until April 2021 when I moved to the other side of the state. When I lived and worked there, I went to a job fair at my old high school for the former company I worked for.

 

The high school made us little welcome bags and gifts, which at the time, I honestly thought was pretty stupid. I live here and work here, guys, and I’ve spent my entire life here. I don’t need a sticker with my high school logo on it, because I see that logo everywhere I go in this town.

 

Now that I moved, that stupid little sticker means the world to me.

 

The thing about my high school is this: We have the best mascot in the entire world. Dodge City High School is home of the Red Demons.

 

Not only are we Demons, we are Red Demons.

 

If you think about it, Demons could eat whatever high school mascot that we play. Buffaloes, Cardinals…those dumb birds and animals are all things that Demons could consume.

 

Guys, I loved high school. I loved elementary school and middle school. College really sucked, like a super hard kind of a suck, but up until that point, I loved everything about school.

 

I got to be in newspaper classes in high school. I got to take photos. I played in band. I wrote poetry for English classes. (Side story: Every time we got assigned to write a poem for class, I would just to back to my house, open up my notebook, and pick one out of the stash I’d already written. And I always got A’s for those. One time during high school, I dropped something off in my English teacher’s class during another class time. My English teacher made it a point to tell her AP English class that was full of seniors how good my poem was and how I nailed that assignment when I was a junior. I laughed to myself and thought, ‘Man, I wrote like that six months ago.’ Haha.)

 

The idea of home exists in my mind. It’s a few square miles where I grew up and learned about the hard things in life.

 

The hard thing about life is that just when you start to feel confident, life knocks you down and takes the wind out of you.

 

I lost my hometown when my job ended last year. I sold my house, the one where I could see my elementary school from my front porch. I lost the feeling of being in a safe place.

 

I lost the feeling of home.

 

And then the idea of home went away completely when I moved, well, tried to move to my new town. I tried to buy two houses that ended up falling through. If you read a bit into that, you’ll know that for five months, I did not have a permanent roof over my head.

 

I was homeless.

 

The person who owned her own home for six years in her hometown was, in fact, homeless.

 

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

 

It turns out that the idea of ‘home’ has been more than challenged in the past six months of my life. All I wanted to do during those five months of homelessness was really to give up and go home. I injured myself pretty badly during that time, and then I got sick, and all I wanted to do after work was to just give up and go home.

 

But you can’t really go home when there is literally no home to go to.

 

What do you do when you want to give up and go home, but there’s nowhere to go?

 

You don’t go anywhere or change anything. You show up, go to work every day, and when you get up the next day, you do it all over again because that’s all you’ve got in life at the moment.

 

There have been times in my life where I didn’t even have that – a job in my profession – so throughout all of this, I was secretly just happy that I get to work in my professional and do creative things all day long.

 

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I’m going home this weekend, and next weekend too, for a whopping night. I’ll stop in my hometown, hang out with friends, and probably stay up late drinking tea with my Mom (best nights ever).

 

I guess I’m going back to my hometown. But is that really home, now?

 

I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know if I ever will.

 

Is the place that I live in now, is that place actually my home? Not really. I sleep there, but I don’t own it and it doesn’t feel like mine.

 

Right now, I’m just stuck in this weird little world, the in-between, the purgatory, between once having felt at ‘home’ and now feeling like maybe I don’t know what ‘home’ is after all.

 

I wish this story had a happy ending, but right now, this is where it ends.

 

I live in a place that isn’t mine. And every once in a while, I do go home, a place where I feel like home, but a place that I’m not sure I’ll ever live in again.

 

And that’s a really weird feeling.