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Originally Posted by whtnoise
now... i've always heard that home is where your heart is. a place where fond memories lie, a comfortable bed, and plenty of pillows, a warm shower, hot coffee, thanksgiving dinner and peach cobbler. the place you always know you can do your laundry - or - still willing, your mother will do it for you. the place that at night you smile before closing your eyes, because you know, undoubtedly, that you are home, and there's no place in the world like it, and no-one to take it from you.
then, home falls away, and the last bit of security you know becomes some far-off thought, too difficult to completely remember, too easy to completely forget...
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You know, I've moved 10 times in the last 10 years, and all that time, home was still there for me. I tried to keep re-inventing it as the place you describe, that magical place where I felt "happy." But it never was like that, at least not after everything went to shit (parents split, weird relatives moved in, lack of maintenance, people being miserable there). Sure, my mom would still do my laundry, I could go to sleep smiling, a few times... but a year ago, my mom decided to sell the place to developers who would tear down the house my dad built by hand, rip out the trees, and vomit a bunch of suburban houses onto that beautiful land. 22 years of life there, all my memories, will be gone. Who would have known that my mother would have been the one to take that place from me.
So I feel a deep sadness, wanting my home to never change... my boyfriend and I go back for Thanksgiving next month, and there will be pie. But my grandmother, who lived there for half of my life, will mostly likely have died by then of a slow-moving cancer. My mother will be depressed, and looking to move on into a new house, a suburban one a few miles away. Her family will have turned their back on her. The house is run-down and on its way to obliteration.
But I can't be angry, because Shesus is right. After a certain age, we cannot expect "home" to be where we grew up, anymore. It becomes our own responsibility to make it wherever we go. I have to let go that idea of home... if I don't, I will suffer more.
dhukka (for the Buddhists out there)... the pain of clinging on to something in the hope of it giving me happiness, when really, it can never satisfy me.