Home Is A Place You Never Really Leave

Home is a place with the porch light on, where the front door is unlocked just in case you forget your key. 

Home is a place that often looks like a Michael Cera movie: too cute to be taken seriously, too quirky for its own good, where returning always feels a little surreal.

Home is a place where the coffee shops are full, where people come and stay a while. Where the sun is warm, but the people are warmer, a place that nurtures as much as it forgives.  

Home is a place with an old friend to meet you on the other side of your dramatic running hug, to hold you up then fall to the ground with you. Home is a place where falling isn’t so terrifying. 

Home is a place bundled in contradictions, the way it changes completely but remains exactly the same. The way it feels undeniably good for you, safe and simple and certain, but you know better than to think you can stay forever. You know better, I promise. 

Home is a place with fewer questions, with less uncertainty. A place where everything feels a little more effortless, where the familiarity is comforting until it becomes limiting. You’ll love it so much you’ll let it strangle you. 

Home is a place that you’ll spend a lifetime wanting to leave until you do for the first time. Then returning and leaving again will feel impossible. You’ll cry on highways. You’ll cry sitting next to strangers on airplanes. You’ll cry in cabs and on sidewalks and wonder why you ever left at all. 

Your hometown will always be your first love, the one that saw you through your awkward years and loved you anyway. The one you took for granted until he was no longer yours. A once love and an always will be love in one way or another. Leaving stings every time, a heartbreak hangover that lasts until you wake up the next morning in a small apartment in a city you’re still learning to fall in love with.