2001-12-07 - 3:24 p.m.

My Mom comes home today!

OK, so that statement requires a few qualifications. She's not exactly coming home, she's coming to Florida from California. She doesn't live here. The house she's coming to is not the same one she lived in when she did. This apartment is not home, not like the house. Kind of raises the question: where is home? If I go visit her in Cali, am I going home? No, I've never lived im Cali. I live here in this apartment with my Dad, and this is kind of home in that sense, but this home is incomplete. I'll be moving out relatively soon, anyways, so I can't call this my home, really. Of course, when I move out, whatever hole-in-the-wall I rent won't be home either: it too will be impermanent, a pause in my wanderings as I go about the business of building a life, and a home, out of nothing.

I think home has a different meaning than all that. It can't be geographic: if it was, home would not exist, I'd have left it. But I feel at home here. I feel at home when I visit Billy in New York. I would feel at home in Cali, too, if I ever get out there. I don't feel at home when I'm here, and Dad's gone, anymore than I feel at home when my brother goes out to school and I'm sitting in his apartment without him. Beyond the saying 'Home is where the Heart is', Home is wherever you feel safe. At ease. Whenever you feel comfortable enough to let your guard down, burp in public, lie about in your underwear and scratch yourself, and know that anyone that sees you won't disown you for being gross. I'm at home with my family. There are a lot of people who can't say the same thing.

Wherever I go, or end up, or far away I get, I always have a home, just as my family will always have a home with me. As long as I stay close, distance doesn't matter.

My Mom comes home today.

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