Home?

You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have someplace where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone...You'll see one day when you move out. It just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this right of passage, you know? You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. You know, for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know? (Garden State)

Home is a concept that has been on my mind a lot lately. When you're in your 20s, home is a puzzling concept. It's particularly bad if you move into dorms, I think. Your parents' house kind of stops feeling like home. Oh, you still call it home. And in some ways, I guess it always will be home, but now there's this other place, this place that you live eight months of the year, that feels more like home. At least, it does if you're like me and you're lucky enough to live with people who you genuinely feel at home with. And then summer comes and you move back "home." But you can't help but feel like you are moving away from home at the same time. It's confusing. You wind up with two separate worlds, a foot in each one. It only gets worse when you graduate. You've spent four years in this limbo, but you've also been carefully constructing a home for yourself. I know I did. And it had more to do with the people than the place, but I think that spaces hold significance, so the place probably had a role to play as well. The people are the really important part though. I just went to a wedding of some dear friends this weekend and sitting at a table amongst people I had spent years in school with, living with some of them, I felt profoundly at home. So, now that I'm moving across the country, and we are all scattering like shards from a dropped glass, where is home? What is home? I've loved this quote from Garden State for a long time because it just seems to capture this homeless kind of feeling so well.