For years I thought that if I looked around far enough I would find where I belonged. I had it once, as a child and lost it sometime around age 13… but I kept thinking that I would find it again. Just around a corner, or a country, there it would be, just waiting. Home. The only place I have ever wanted to be.
Glimpses appeared now and then, tantalizing, like an addiction, a drug. It became a priority. Stay around things, people, that remind you of it. Stay away from things that smell odd or unusual. Stay near the scent, don’t lose the scent. A fear developed… that I might forget. And then never be able to find it again. To be lost forever. I have been lost for so long, sometimes I wonder, is it still worth it to be alive if the hope of being found, or of finding, is gone for good?
I don’t want to admit it. I think that this, all of this, is about ME. That I am the center of home. It formats itself to who I am, and what I am. That’s what makes it home, right?
I don’t want to see.
But there is one place… it’s been the same place all along. Even as a child… what made the trees love me, and what made the arms of my family safe, and the fireflies in the dark twinkle with the gladness of being MY fireflies, in MY yard… it was all the same. Even now, the same. At eleven years old, and at thirteen, sixteen, twenty. Its Him.
So although today I am twenty-five, my gut aches with the ever familiar longing, begging, to go home. It will be a long road, but I will take it. I know where it leads. I know that the scent will become stronger as I go. And I won’t be alone.