Home Again. Part 1.

In the midst of love and life experiences, deep sadness, joy, and resolute hope, each year brings further tangling up, weaving together, unraveling, creation, and rebuilding of relationships, which are what I have long thought determine a person's "home". Since each year is different, and each season brings with it a new lens of experience through which to perceive my various relationships - with friends, family, classmates, strangers, and other - I think that my perception of what "home" means is wont to shift too. Granted, a lot of last year's post on homecoming still holds quite true.

Right now, I feel extra unsettled. The place I want to call home isn't entirely the home I want it to be, and the place that I could call home isn't where I want to be. (So really, I'm still a two-home gal ;)) ... Haha! How fickle am I?

Definitions of "home" that have been sitting in my mind as of late:
- A place where there is always someone waiting for you at the airport (or at least someone who wants to be there, even if they can't make it!)
- A place where you have family and good friends.
- A place you want to be.
- A place where you can happily picture pieces of your future playing out.
- Where your absence is felt, and where there are people whose absence you feel.
- Where, when you leave, there are people who eagerly await your return.
- Where, when your plane gets low enough so that you can see the whole area splayed out below, you feel that tug, that special fondness that not only makes you feel you could just look and look and eat up everything in sight, but that makes you ready to touch earth too, because you know the paths you want to wander, and who you want to wander them with.
- It's a place where you know that the person, and people, you want to wander those paths with is/are just as happy to do so as you.

- It's a place where you know you are wanted.
- It's a place where you know you are loved.

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As I finish writing that list, it kind of strikes me that those are mostly very selfish, one-sided "home" definitions, all very concentrated on what home does for me. ... I think that perhaps I need to work on what home means to me with respect to what I do for those there. 

To be continued.