Home

   When I was very young, my parents divorced. My Mom left Alaska with five confused kids, and we moved to Iowa. I started to cling to my room, the living room, and the kitchen as familiar places, and became a homebody. That didn't change till I was eighteen, and went to college. There, my Junior and Sophomore year, I found out what a home really was, a place to gain strength to go out and live. It was made home by my friends, by the people around me. Senior year, our hall dissolved, and I looked for another home. I didn't really find one, and have felt homeless since--living with people I love, but not at home.
    What is home? It is a place of safety, of rest. It is familiar, and it smiles when you are there. It is people, the ones you know through and through, the ones who know you. It is, summed up, the place your heart looks for.
   It is shaped by your personality and shapes who you are; it interacts with your personality. You have written on each other in a way that will not be erased. Home is written on your memory, and any others who live or visit there will take away memories of you in your home.
    It is a place where more defenses are down and yet where you must keep a tight grip on your temper, for when you let your guard down your heart no longer tries to cover up its sin.
    It is beauty and safety; it is a task and a chore. The responsibility for it is yours, but with that responsibility is a gift - it becomes your own. By entrusting itself to you, it has become fully yours.

    But I have found, over the past few years, that my home is no longer a place to retreat, and then that pushes me out to venture into the world again. I come home and do not want to leave; I look for home all the time I am out, and hide within it once I have reached it after work.
    Other things call me out - church, the grocery store, a movie with my sisters, or libraries and bookstores, but I pass swiftly through most of those, looking just to go home again.
   What is different, then, between now and what I had before?
    Perhaps it is how much I enjoyed things outside my home (dorm) at college, or perhaps it is that I do not know people as well now (outside of home) as I did then, so I am not pulled to go find them. But I look around my home here, and realize that I need to find things at home that allow me to give out, not just taken in; my home now needs to be a place that strengthens me to interact with the world it exists in.
    So I will try. We'll see how this goes.