Longing for home (October 3, 2006)

Do you ever have one of those days where you want to go home? I mean, really go home? Back to a time and place that doesn't exist anymore? To people who knew me when I was growing up, to a family who loved me, to a neighborhood that allowed me to play and run wild, to a dog that never calms down, to a best friend's house that always left the back door open...

I think I am having one of those days. Weeks, maybe. I'm not sure why, exactly. I think about my life right now and it's nothing like I ever thought it would be. Not in a bad way, not at all. I think that for the most part I am where I am supposed to be. Here and there I make stupid decisions that make life a little harder, sometimes a lot harder, but still pretty nice compared to some. But sometimes I'm missing... something.

Something like the past. There are so many moments, memories that will never happen again, that only exist vicariously in the minds and hearts of the people who hold them. Sometimes I miss them so much that it hurts, and I can't breathe for the cries that threaten to escape.

Warm summer evenings spent with my dad, best friend and her family in their backyard, listening to my dad sing and play songs on his guitar, not a clue in the world that we were experience a little piece of heaven that night.

Driving around the town on Christmas Eve with my family to look at Christmas lights, listening to the same cassette tape of carols every year, excited to go home and enjoy hot cocoa, Manheim Steamroller, and one present before bed.

And there are so many people from my past that are so much a part of who I am that I feel as though I'm slowly losing myself the farther apart we grow. I'm horrible at keeping in touch. It doesn't mean I don't care. It doesn't mean I've moved on. Well, we all have moved on in one way or another. But these memories, these relationships, they are still very much a part of me. The farther I get from my past, the more it becomes central to who I am and who I need to be. Does that make any sense?

The older you get, the more you want people in your life who "knew you when." Because they were with you then. Those people, they helped make you who you are. Those memories, they are your life. Sometimes I feel so far away from where I've been. I wish there was a way to bring the past and present together, a way to connect who I was with who I am and who I am becoming. I know there must be. I'm probably doing it and just don't realize it at the moment. It's late, after all, and I'm sleep-deprived.

It's not like I'm living in isolation, far away from people I love and places I belong. I am where I belong. I love where I am. I can't put into words how much the people I have met in the last few years mean to me, how much of an impact they have had and continue to have in my life. Given the chance, there isn't anywhere else I would go.

But I am still so far from home.