an ode to home

I know this place.

I know the smell. The specific combination of lotions and soaps and perfumes. Of cleaners and dryer sheets and dogs. Of wine and wild flowers and freshly cut grass and then it all blends together in a unique way that produces one of the most recognizable scents I’ve ever come to know. Life of the familiar.

I know which doors stay unlocked as a standing invitation to anyone who chooses to just stop by. Which ones squeak when opened late at night and the certain spots on the floor that give and groan when tip-toeing through the darkness from one room to the other. (And don’t even get me started on how many times I’ve almost tripped over the rug that bridges the gap between the linoleum kitchen and carpeted dining area. The number is staggering.)

I know where the dishes go, where the glasses are and which ones will imprint yet another water ring on the already beautifully marred (ahem, distressed) wooden furniture if I’m not careful. I know the permanent stains on the countertops left behind like a trail of memories from years upon years of meals created. I know that as I stood alone and barefoot in the kitchen early Sunday evening chopping lettuce into a million little pieces while simultaneously swaying to the music filtering through the speakers, that a realization crashed down on me in the most powerful of ways: this must be what home feels like. I’ve never been so comfortable in my whole life.

It’s a little unorthodox for me to consider this place my home as I do because in all actuality, it’s just not mine. It's not the apartments with roommates and dirty bathrooms and a perpetually empty refrigerator that has been my definition of home for the past few years. I didn’t grow up here and get to experience the changes and growth as it occurs in both the occupants and the actual place itself. The demolitions and expansions, the subtle changes in colors throughout and the life that was absorbed into those walls and rooms by the people that were. There, I mean.

But now that I am here, I am attached in a way that I can only describe as a strong serum that flows freely through my veins, unraveling everything that I am within. Memories I have bounce and reflect off every wall in every room causing the strings of my heart to tighten yet again in the most painfully obvious way. This corner, that chair, that spot on the floor. That deck, that bed, those steps. It is nothing and everything all at once.

I know this place. Where the peace and stillness mix with the faint, bustling sound of the freeway in a strange cocktail that is equal parts soothing to my ears and my being as it is an annoyance to most others. I’ve always loved the quiet, but the too quiet really gets to me in a not-so-nice way. The too quiet unnerves me, unhinges me and shifts something within. I need the pull of the familiar noise to unclench my fists and loosen the knots and lift the weight. I need it to feel…relief.

When my perspective is off-center and I’m really feeling that push and shove that is life, it is this place that qualms the insistent anxieties plaguing me. It is here where I can sit and realize (for the millionth time) that life is a circle and it’s okay to feel lost sometimes and that growing up is only as scary as you (I) manifest it to be andandandandand....

I need to feel like there is one place in this world that I can go to and be safe. Where I'm not just scrambling to pick up the pieces of myself from the floor only to feel it all just slip through my fingers. And for me that is and always will be here regardless of the circumstances of how it came to be.

Home.