"Home is Where the Heart Is"

Do you believe in the old saying: "Home is where the heart is"?

I don’t know whether I’ve said it just a few times or as often as a few hundred. This is the one time I’ve ever given it any thought.

Ever since the summer after my seventh birthday, since my parents divorced, I lost touch with my previous life of having one, consistent, childhood home. I had two separate houses. Two separate rooms. Two separate wardrobes. Two separate beds. Two separate parents. Either or. This or that. I was thrust, struggling and unwilling, literally kicking and screaming, into a new life. I had a new task, never to be completed, of alternating between and balancing two homes. Not to mention two families. Just one extra home, along with the division of an old one, was enough to distract me from the whole purpose of a home. I couldn’t see straight enough to know which way to grow.

Even the names of my pets depended on the day of the week. Monday? It would be time to feed my cat Sophie. What about the third Thursday of the month? I'd reunite with my cat Butter. In quiet rebellion I whispered his name in his ear, hoping he remembered his true identity. My dad had renamed him Bela (after Bartok) when my mom moved out. It felt like I was telling him forgotten secrets about a life that came before this one. Occasionally I sensed, even during the younger years, that none of this went along with the idea of a traditional home. With young and optimistic ideals about life and the world, it just didn't seem fair. It wasn’t fair learning how to balance the newfound instability of a home that should have been my center instead. It’s selfish, but I’m human, and I was adjusting.

This world of confusion became the new viewpoint, the new direction I took when my life changed for the first time, seven years in. It forever compelled me to carry my home with me, no matter where I went. I neither realized it at the time nor came even close to understanding. The only thought in my mind was of the divorce. Only now that I’m older do I see that right next to thought, not quite easy to see at first, is understanding.

But back then my instincts were on fire. I fled from putting trust in associating my childhood home with anything temporary. I couldn’t trust it with places, with houses, or with the ups and downs of falling in love. I stubbornly refused to let myself risk losing the basic comforts of home. I couldn’t leave them anywhere, I decided. So I took them with me.

I had been directed off the path created by a single, united home. With a lack of direction came a lack of tolerance for trying to figure out which, of two, was the place I could call my home. I couldn’t choose, just as I couldn’t choose between my parents. I turned to the only remaining option. I made the choice not to choose.
My childhood home is found in every place where my memories are still alive. It’s found in every memory where my youth is still breathing. My memories, I've found, always have had a kind of immunity to separation that my physical home held onto for a brief seven years.

I don't even know who first said "Home is where the heart is", which implies its place in the realm of clichés. It’s probably heard so often, the actual meaning is overlooked. I've definitely haven’t thought about it before this. I've heard it thousands of times. I've probably said it. I’ve never wondered what it might mean.

Until I was eighteen, I lived eleven years without ever fully experiencing the unity and normalcy of an unbroken family. When I left for college almost three months ago, I was overwhelmed by the recovery of something I hadn't experienced in over a decade. In one day, I gained a new home. Just one. In one day I reached what had for so long been held just out of my grasp. I found the chance to put down my roots somewhere.

Family unity reentered my life in the form of new friends. I live in Fredericksburg, Virginia. That's it. It doesn't seem like a very big deal. I know better, though. There's nothing better than the return of something you thought you’d lost forever. There's nothing better than beginning a sentence with “I live”.

Those two little words give every life’s story a setting, a backdrop, a place in the world of its very own. I came to Fredericksburg and found where I fit in with the world.

But then something really strange happened. I bought a bus ticket home for my friend Stephanie's 19th birthday. She took a year off after high school in order to work and take a moment to breath. It felt, and still feels, not completely right being away at college without her. When I entered her house that day, I saw Stephanie for the first time since I'd left. I felt an unfamiliar sense of nostalgia. The familiar became new to me in how old it felt.

We drove all around the area that once served as our playground in our high school days, our actual childhood. With me at the wheel, Stephanie in the passenger’s seat, loud music, we knew that no time had passed between us. Stephanie and home are one in the same, both protected from the passage of time.

I stepped into the indie movie theater where Stephanie works, remembering the times I almost felt that I lived there. I talked to some younger friends of mine, those still in high school. I realized that I felt envious of the fact that they still lived in the world I left behind just a few months ago. It feels like I left years ago.

I felt the pull of Fredericksburg when I returned to Fairfax. I needed to go back to the one place that stands still and lets me move forward on my own. Even so, there was something I'd never realized about Fairfax, Annandale, and Falls Church, the host cities to my school, mother, and father. And to me, I suppose.

I didn’t see a single place around me where I could restore my home. I stowed it away in my heart, the safest place I could think of at the time. The heart of a child is a pretty good spot to put anything in need of protection, especially if it’s your entire beginning. I needed something whole, now that my previous place of residence was fragmented. I guess my heart caught my eye. It had never been broken. It came pretty close, when my mom first told me about the divorce, but somehow stayed intact.

I knew I could trust my heart not to break, but at the price of realizing it could be broken. So I carefully stored my innocence right next to my home. I knew they’d be safe next to my heart beat.

"Home is where the heart is", as they say.

When I returned to Northern Virginia for the first time, I finally saw the area where I grew up as my home. I heard it in every path in the woods that once echoed with my footsteps. There it was, my home, a bit blurry as I craned my neck from the driver's seat. It took on the form of Woodson High School. I entered the main lobby of Cinema Arts, Stephanie's workplace, one of my favorite safe havens from before.

Home washed over me as I stood once again in my Dad's house, the first house I ever lived in. I met home in my mom's eyes when they lit up as she opened the door. Home welcomed me back to the place where we learned to rebuild and move on. I was home. I was home and that night I got to watch Stephanie open her birthday presents.

I hadn't ever seen how much of my home I kept within myself. Every place I ever loved, every person, every tree, every rock, stream, view of the sun, defined something I could trust with my heart. In losing a single, solitary home, I found where both my heart and home truly belong....everything, everywhere, and everyone.

My heart found the place where it fits perfectly when I came to Fredericksburg, but it has countless other homes. "Home is where the heart is". I'll always have a home, as long there's a place that holds onto a piece of my heart.

It's a heart both separated and united by everywhere it’s found a home.

My heart is where my home is. My home is where my heart is.

Home is where the heart is found safe within everything.
Home is where the heart is whole, never broken.
Home is where the heart is still as innocent as it was in the beginning.
Home is the heart.
Home is your heart.