Home
After three trips in four weeks it feels really good to be home for a while. In fact, we don’t have any official flights booked and while we have a few things in the works, I’m pretty thankful that from now through the wedding I get to be in Tampa. More than that, I’m excited that in just under a month we will be married and I’ll be coming home to Blake.
In college I took photography. After hours of shooting and developing pictures of houses in this nearly perfect neighborhood in Carmel, IN for a project my professor said to me: it seems to me that you’re trying to figure out what home is and find it. It hit me hard but he was right. Much of my childhood I struggled with the idea that I’m not ‘from’ anywhere. If I tried to show Blake where I ‘grew up’ it would be a several week tour of states, cities, houses, and football stadiums.
After more than 12 years in Tampa I’m happy to say I consider myself from Tampa, the only city that’s ever truly felt like home to me. Has there always been a bit a ‘hometown void’? Yes. I’ve thought a million times how cool it would be to have a hometown where you know people and they know you. Where you had your first date or learned to drive a car. Where you graduated from high school with people you’d known since elementary school.
I will never have that. All of my big moments have been spread out across the east coast. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have some regrets about that but what I’ve realized over the years is that you make home. Home isn’t just a building or a town. It isn’t crossing the same intersection every day or all of your Christmas photos being taken in the same living room. Home is more feeling than a physical place. It’s somewhere you belong. It’s the place you go when you’re feeling down or a little beat up. The feeling of safety. Home is family and friends so close they feel like family.
Now that I have Blake I have found it. I’ve always had family and over the years I’ve build arguably the best friend group in the world. I’ve spend 12 years making my house 'a home’. But at the end of next month when I start being able to come home to the love of my life I’ll finally have what I was trying so hard to show in my artwork: home. Turns out I was looking in the wrong place. I was looking at perfect picket fence houses and assuming that inside was home. Home like all important things is made and earned and worked for much like love.
If you have somewhere you grew up and you can drive through and point out where all your big moments happened I hope you appreciate that. From a girl who desperately wanted that take this advice: cherish it. But if you’re like me and you spent many days crying over moving boxes trying to figure out where you belonged I offer a different piece of advice: find someone to whom you can say: home is wherever I’m with you.
