Home

Home.

Home is an abstract concept to me, something which as a child, I never fully understood. What does it mean? I decided to look it up.

Home (noun) The place or region where something is native or most common.

In my early childhood, my home was constantly changing, which, if you ask me is an oximoron. How can something be common if it's never the same?

It can't. But that's the way things are. Life is an oximoron. I've learned to live with that.

Even so, questions still burn inside me. Did I even have a home? In five years I traveled to over 52 places. (47 states and 5 countries.) How do I know which one was my home? Were they all my home? How can one fully understand their identity, where they come from, without their home? To me, my childhood, my earliest memories, my home before the age of five...all of it...it's nothing but a black hole in my universe. A place where matter and dying stars have merged, where the universe is collapsing in on itself. It's a void where so many things should be but aren't. I feel empty, there's a missing piece, a part of life I fear I've missed out on.

And yet, everyone fails to recognize this. They find it quite the opposit. All they see is a girl who "is so lucky to have traveled so much, so young."
They fail to realize the fatal flaw in this perfection, the damage it can cause. How can you remember when there's nothing the same to hold on to, to look back on. No room to spark your memory, object to remind you of a mood. There's nothing. Nothing but pictures. And pictures don't help you remember anything except the picture itself. And what help is that?

Of course, all this time I've talked of my physical home. In my opinion, the only real home I've ever had, is the one I keep inside my head. It's a place, where I come from (or am naitive to) and it doesn't change dramatically from week to week, like my physical home used to.

It's the one place where I know that I'm safe from the outside world. I'm protected from getting hurt, from change, and from real life. It's more home to me than any of those 52 places I've been, or even the place that I live in now. I've lived there, in my mind, longer than anywhere else; it's always been home to me.

My world, my universe, it's who I am.
Universe Euphaeria is me, not that enormous black hole which exists within it and continues to attempt to eat my universe away, bit by bit and eat away everything that I've created for myself, in my memory since the age of four: a child desperate for something to hold on to.
That child still exists, within me, within the universe I so carefully created around my constantly moving lifestyle so that it could never go without me.
I saved myself from change, I created a new life.
I took control, for better or for worse.

I guess you could say it's like that famous quote:

"Home, is where the heart is."