when i was little home was something easy to describe. Home was that largish brick house where i lived with mom & dad. i'd walk in after getting off the school bus and see mom in the kitchen making a snack, or when i was a little older i made the snack myself.
but then i moved to another country. South Africa was another world entirely from what i'd known and when time came for our 1st furlough i couldn't wait to be back in the usa. but as time went on i guess i just got acclimatized and now i've come to the us and it doesn't feel like home at all. no friends to hang at the beach with, no beach, completely different worldviews, the food's different i can't work in farenheight, pounds, ounces and quarts anymore, it's like complete gibberish to me. and the us isn't the us i used to call home when i was 8.
so i've begun to do some thinking,
home isn't where you were born
home isn't where you're from
home isn't even where you currently live
i used to call home where you stayed for the night
but home isn't any of these things. home has nothing to do with geographic locations...
home is where your friends are, where you have people that you would trust like your own family, where you feel comfortable, where you have a place that you feel that the puzzle piece that's you fits perfectly, where you have a deep gut feeling that this is home
i guess, the old adage is right...
"home is where the heart is" and the heart changes, it adapts, it grows and as it does so i guess it changes it's feeling of "home" to the gap you've grown into
and, i guess, right now, that home is in South Africa
but why do i still have this nagging feeling of a sort of concrete responsibility to the usa? a sense of patriotism to a country that i don't really have any emotional ties left with?
i feel like i'm being torn between my old "home" and my new one. one's a tie of a perceived sense of responsibility, patriotism & citizenship, the other's a tie of the heart...
help!
i'm confused
i wanna go home...
...please?
No comments:
Post a Comment