Home...

Home. What makes a home? What is your definition of home? Is it the house you live in? The city in which you dwell? The place you go to most often?

I'm not sure I've ever really had physical home. I live in eight different homes growing up in New Jersey and Richmond, then lived in three different places while in college. After college, the pattern continued and I lived in another four different places in five years. And now...I live in what could be described more liken to a cubicle than a "home". On top of all this, my parents now dwell in two completely different states, switching between NC and Florida on a whim. My mom travels the country during the week and my dad drives up to Richmond. Oh, and my brother commutes back and forth to Chicago. Besides the fact that a psychologist would have a field day with this family movement, I almost feel destined to keep on the move...never really establishing that "home".

Sometimes I envy those who have grown up in the same house, never moving neighborhoods, cities or states, Other times I think how boring and montonous that would be. Change is exciting, thrilling, invigorating. But...with change comes disruption, seperation and movement.

Over the past few days I've thought a lot about the idea of home and how with all the change that has constantly happened throughout my life, I don't really have a home I can go to. Sure, I can visit Atlanta, but I don't say I'm heading home. The closest thing to home for me is my parents beach house in North Carolina, but now they might even sell that property. No, to me, the idea of home is in the feeling I get when I'm around those certain people that make you feel as if you are comfortable enough to be home. To me, home literally is where my heart is. It's in Atlanta, it's in Florida, North Carolina, Richmond, Austin, Chicago, Colorado.

My heart, my home it seems, is everywhere except New York City.

This past weekend was spent with family and very close friends. The past two days have been spent alone, longing for that place and sense of home. I worry that I will forever be on the move, changing from one thing to the next, one day to the next, one place to the next. I worry that I will never find my home where I actually am. The changes that have been made have been exciting, thrilling, exhilirating...but at the end of the day, I return to something that is not filled with love and hugs and smiles. I return to an apartment that is cozy and cute but also cramped and cold at the same time. It's missing something. My "home" in NYC is missing something. I have a feeling I know what it is...but what am I to do? Turn around and leave the reason I came here? Turn around and run back to the familiar? All I can do is push forward, move ahead and keep making the changes that will eventually bring me to my home here, there, wherever it is that I might end up. And until then, I will keep my heart and my home with those I love the most.