Take Me Home Tonight

Home has always occupied a central place in humanity's collective imagination. It's our castle. It's where the heart is, according to untold millions of tacky wall hangings in homes across suburban America. Western Canon's central epic is all about that unquenchable desire to return home. Odysseus spends ten years and surmounts dozens of trials and dangers simply because he wants to return home to Ithaca. For a story to remain culturally relevant for thousands of years, it has to strike a very deep chord in our imagination. And the Odyssey does this, because we all know what it's like to want to return home, to want to see familiar shores, and more importantly, familiar faces. And I think at least a few of us have experienced that deep sense of dread that comes with the idea that we might not see home again.

As a recent college graduate who's moving far away fairly soon, I've been wrestling with the whole concept of home recently. Indeed, I haven't been able to post to this blog for a while, because I've been away from home, traveling around to visit various friends for the past few days. Being away really got me thinking about what meaning I attach to home, and whether or not I really have a place that's "home," right now.

I remember getting ready to go back to college after Christmas break freshman year, I said to my mom that I was ready to go home, meaning back to school, now that vacation was done. In that little slip of the tongue, I had completely reversed how most people reference their home and school lives, but I know I was not the only freshman to at least subconsciously consider school as his new home. It's interesting though, that prior to break, I know many kids were feeling homesick for the places they grew up, but now everyone seemed eager to return to school after a long break. Everyone had visited their high school friends. At least for me, it was fun, but sad at the same time. We had a good time catching up and doing the same stuff we did in high school. But mostly, we told stories. More to the point, we told stories about the things we did in college, and the people we met there. Most tellingly, we all told those stories with a certain longing in our voices, a certain desire to go back to where we'd made all those crazy stories. It was sad because while we were having fun together again like old times, everyone could sense that we really didn't have as much in common anymore. Our lives were now elsewhere, and while close friends always remained close, we weren't part of each other's lives in the same way anymore.

I think this happened because school had become home for most of us. Before we left, there were Facebook countdowns for "OMG, 10 days until HOME to see my loves <3" but after a month of home and chafing under the parental yoke, the countdowns changed to "OMG, can't wait to get back to (insert school) get me outta here. Sent from my iPhone." I could understand this, because at least for me, school had become my home, because that was where my life was. I was very lucky yo make a good portion of my closest friends within the first six months of school. So I had people I wanted to go back to and I had things I wanted to do back there.

Don't get me wrong, I think we'll always have an attachment to the home we knew in childhood. That's true because we have memories there. Opening the big Lego set under the Christmas tree. Your dad yelling at you for screwing up the first time you mowed the lawn. Late night drives, and our first jobs. Those types of things. There's always a certain comfort to going back to your original home too. You know what to expect. You know what's on the menu, you know exactly how many trips you can make to Subway on empty in the car you learned to drive in. But eventually, we all have that moment where we walk in to the bedroom where we grew up and we feel like visitors. Mom made the bed, and all your mail's there. But God, it feels like a hotel.

After graduation, I think a lot of us returned to our childhood homes, at least for a while. Some were only there for a week or so, some of us for a year or indefinitely. I'm back for a few months, with a definite date of departure, and while I've settled in, this definitely isn't the "home," the way it once was, and it hasn't been for years now. I know a lot of my friends who graduated recently feel the same way. Most are at loggerheads with their parents by now, hoping to move out as soon as possible. Parents are in a tough situation though too. At some level, they always want us here with them, otherwise, there would be no such thing as empty nest syndrome. However, there's just too much of a lifestyle gap between twenty somethings and people in their 50s and 60s. We just aren't meant to live together.

It's uncomfortable, but good in a way. If it were comfortable we might stay forever. I don't have a solid definition of home anymore, but the Seacoast will always be some part of that definition. I'm in transition in a lot of ways, and having no set, defined place I call home for now can be a little unnerving. At the same time though, I take solace in the fact that we can change our definition of home. Because of that, it's not difficult to find a new home, because we can find people we connect with anywhere. To me, home is all about the people. Everyone wanted to go back to college, not because of classes, or even solely because of the parties. We all wanted to go back because of the people we'd connected with there. That's the same reason our parents' house will always be home to us in one way or another. For better or worse, we share a connection with our families.

And Odysseus was the same way. When he first finds out from Minerva that he has indeed, landed in Ithaca: "Then Odysseus rejoiced at finding himself again in his own land, and kissed the bounteous soil." Of course he missed the shores of Ithaca, the enchanted inlets, and the gentle sloping fields. But he was really missing Penelope and Telemachus. His home his been violated by suitors, and that's why there are another eleven books to the Odyssey after Odysseus has already returned home. He has to put his house in order. More importantly, he has to avenge his honor and return to his queen. Home was important then as it is now. Odysseus may be in his homeland, but he has not really returned home, until the people he cares about are safe. And I think that's really the definition of home that works for me. It's the place where we find the people we care about. The place that, during a long and arduous journey, we find ourselves longing for.