I notice it on the second week of Christmas break.
My parents are both working late, so I volunteer to make dinner, putting together the same soup my mother used to make whenever I was sick as a child. My little brother has been convinced to set the table, and I blink when I see the plates he took out. “When did we get new plates?”
He stares at me and then looks down at the plates in his hands. They are white and have a pretty border of green swirls. The plates I remember were completely blue.
“Oh. Dad dropped one last month so mom got a new set.”
“I didn’t notice before.” How had I not noticed?
My little brother shrugs, “I mean, it’s just plates. You don’t live here anymore, so it’s not like you knew we switched them.”
And then he walks away to finish setting the table like he didn’t just shoot me in the chest.
I don’t know when it truly hit me that I didn’t live in my childhood home anymore. Maybe it was when I started saying I was “going to my parent’s house for the holidays” instead of just saying I was going home. Maybe it was when I bought my own blender instead of stealing my family’s old one. Maybe it happened the second I stepped into my freshman-year dorm.
But I haven’t lived in that house for more than a few weeks for over a year now, which probably means that I need to start moving on.
I’ve been trying to define the word home, recently. When I was a kid, home just meant the physical location. I used to have these vivid nightmares where my childhood home would catch fire, and they scared me more than any monsters under my bed. I used to think it took having a physical, permanent place to stay that made a home.
The past three years of my life have proven that wrong. I’ve bounced around and around, from two different dorms to a summer internship apartment in a different city, to finally my own apartment. But even that won’t last forever. Now, I’m looking at graduate schools all across the country, and not a single one is even in this state.
But in every single place, I’ve still had a home.
My mother still has the string of photos from my graduation on the living room floor; the posters that decorated my first-year dorm hang in my new apartment; my second-year dorm probably still has the stains on the sink from dying my roommate’s hair black; I have the flowers that decorated my bedroom this summer pressed between the pages of an old journal. I bring people into my new apartment, take photos of every event and party, frame my friend’s smiles with the lens, and immortalize my love for them. I’ll bring them into whatever place I end up next, and place the old photos on the fridge, leaving room for new ones too.
I still don’t think I can properly define home; how do you define something that stretches through time, that exists in fifteen different places, that changes every step of the way, that walks the line between a physical place and a concept you can only hold on your heart? Sure, I don’t live with my parents anymore, but it’s still home. The old porch light will still glow in the distance when I come back; it will always be there when I need it to be. Every time I leave for some new place, I’ll reach into the lamp and pull out a little bit of its flame, and I'll use it to warm my new hearth.
It’s not a true definition, but maybe it’s a start.
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