This is Home

At age seven, home was that white walled, navy blue trimmed house with bright green grass and pretty, delicate little flowers that she had been living in since she could remember. 

Back then, she was still too young, too naive, too blind to see through the forced, plastic smiles on her parents' faces, and the lack of simple warmth in the big house.

She was still a child who was taught that home was where you grew up, and she accepted that fact without a question. 

Her impressionable mind didn't question why the house echoed silence everyday, or why dinners were tense and awkward, or why she was the only one who ever looked up from her plate of microwaved food. She never questioned why her mother stayed locked up in her room, and her father stayed locked up in the room at the opposite end of the hall, or why her bedroom was all the way downstairs, or why the curtains were never drawn back to let in some warm sunlight on a lazy Sunday morning. She never questioned why mother and father never whispered soft lullabies or told her bedtime stories or gave her lingering kisses on the forehead at night.

 She had long since defeated the lurking monsters under her bed, and what with her never leaving the house, except for school, she never noticed anything wrong with her house.

The house was her home, and at age seven, she was sure of it.

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At age eleven, home was still that white walled, navy blue trimmed house. There was no more grass, as no one bothered to water it, and no matter how hard she tried, how many fertilizers she went through or how much water she gave them everyday, she couldn't bring back the pretty little pink flowers. They were too delicate for that place, she figures. At a place where you had to fight for a "Good Job." and nobody gave a second glance at the hard work you put into keeping the place together.

Dinners were no longer eaten at a table together. Microwaved dishes had turned to her sweating in the kitchen, trying to lift heavy pots and pans, just to make sure her mother and father wouldn't starve in their rooms. The rooms felt stale and musty to the senses, seeing as none had seen a glimpse of sun since she had been younger than the age of seven. 

The house still echoed silence, but now her ears were no longer so deaf. Her mother and father no longer bothered straining their muscles to give what could just barely pass as a smile. The house remained isolated from the outside world, and although the outside seemed passable as a normal house, the inside and the family inside was anything but. The curtains stayed closed, dusty and stiff from lack of use through the many, many empty years of her childhood. Her room was now the only semi-bright place in the house for her. The two doors upstairs remained locked up and closed, only opening for a plate of hot, warm food that was cooked with blood sweat and tears, so many tears. The lullabies were left missing, the kisses missed, and the bedtime stories replaced with more silence. Not even crickets in the summer dared to penetrate the wall of isolation that house had.

Now, she began to question this place. The place she called home seemed nothing like what their friends at school complained about. They would whine about nagging from their parents, and the lack of peace and quiet from their bothersome family members. But to her, it didn't sound so bad. Her house never had, and never did have, noise, excluding the accidental drop of a metal pot, or the sound of another glass cup getting dropped onto the tile floor of the kitchen. Thus, the questions began to surface. How come their homes had green grass and pretty flowers? How come they could lift their curtains away from the dirty, stained windows? How come their parents talked to each other? How come their parents yelled at each other, laughed with each other? How come their parents also had their silent moments, but those moments were shared, not taken individually? How come they had rooms upstairs? How come they heard bedtime stories and heard sweet lullabies when they were young? How come her house seemed to grow colder and colder each day she came back from school? How come, in her home, there was nothing but bleak foggy grey colors, and black, and white, while the outside world was so full of colors, colors that were bright and burning, cool and calming, or soothing and passionate?

How come her home was so different from everything else?

At age eleven, her house was still her home, but it was no longer such a seemingly cheerful place.

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At age fourteen, she had no home. 

The house of peeling white walls (white like the color of ripped up paper) and fading blue trimmings (such an ugly blue, ugly, ugly, ugly, too dull, too grey, a colorless color) was now a place for her to sleep, eat, and take shelter from the outside, but nothing more, nothing less. Doors never opened never would be opened, and curtains were forgotten about. She had now gotten a lot better with cooking, to the point loud metallic bangs and piercing sounds of shattering glass disappeared from the infuriatingly empty, aching silence in the house, leaving nothing but a hole even more empty, damp quiet in their place.

The house didn't echo silence anymore. Now it echoed hollow loneliness as she sat, feet aching from shipping food and other necessities up to the two rooms, up that long, infinitely long, dark, sorrowful stretch of stairs. The grass had all died, and she had long since given up in reviving them. This place was no place for such lively colors. No, all that belonged here was grey and black and white and everything else dead and hollow and meaningless, just like her. Lullabies and whispered songs and soft kisses were glared at for never being there for her, just like her parents. School was no better either. Her parents' house, for that was all she would call it now, cut her off from society, so while her old friends were having sleepovers and slumber parties, full of gossip and giddy giggling, she was drifting further and further away from everyone else, locked up behind those ugly walls. 

She had stopped questioning why this place was no longer home. Instead, she spent her free time staring at her blank ceiling (blank, just like her existence, just like her home), just staring and trying her best to ignore how lifeless this place was.

At age fourteen, she knew better than to call this place her home, or that she ever had one, but she knew she couldn't leave just yet, so she just kept on pretending everything was alright, and there was still a point for her being on this planet.

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At age seventeen, she had no home, she had no friends, and she had no family.

She was a single body in the mass of millions, drifting aimlessly. The doors were still closed, the curtains still ignored, she still cooked dinner, and the house was still cold, dark, miserable, and achingly empty of life. She wandered day by day repeating the same sequence. Wake up, go to school, pass school, go back to that dreadful place, cook, eat, finish homework to the point it was passable, pass some time, then sleep, and repeat the next morning. She tried to block out how lonely and broken and how much pure, liquid pain she carried in her everyday by plugging in her headphones and blasting the loudest songs she could find. Because maybe if she heard noises ringing in her head, she could pretend, just for that moment, that she had a home, she had friends, she had a functioning family, and she wasn't so alone in this cruel world. (It never worked for long.)

Her life was empty, like her house, and herself. She had no meaning, no goal for the future. She had nowhere to go, so she was stuck in this terrible house, filled to the roof with invisible sneers at how much of a failure she was. How could she achieve anything in life if she couldn't even keep her home together? Why would anyone disagree with her when she said she was worth nothing? Why should anyone care?

At age seventeen, she had lost her entire existence along with her hope of a home.

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At age nineteen, she still had no homes, no friends, and no family, but she finally had a way out.

She was no longer a drifting soul in the world. She had found a possible anchor, and no matter the millions of risks and reason why she should fail, she simply couldn't, and wouldn't let this chance to leave this cold, cruel, miserable, terrible, painful, empty, lonesome, aching, dark and sad place. 

She had found herself lost in a part of downtown she had never been to before, (Although, she had basically spent her past nineteen years locked up behind those no longer white, no longer blue walls, so she honestly knew nothing about the town at all) when she bumped into an author. After awkward first exchanges and some fumbled conversations, she found herself persuaded into trying to write a short story for the young writer, and a month later, she had applied for several universities for a chance to get a degree in literature. One more week or two, and she had gotten in to one of them, not a very famous or large scale school, but somewhere out in the real world (So many new colors, so many new sounds, so much she had missed for too long). 

She found herself packing her duffle bag, taking what little was significant to her gradually rebuilding heart, and ditching that dreadful place that she had been tied to for too, too, much too long, without a single word of goodbye shared between her and the two adults who she called her parents.

At age nineteen, she was finally, finally, finally leaving, off the find her calling in the world. 

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At age twenty-two, she wondered what she considered her home now.

She had traveled far and wide, searching for inspiration. She had graduated, gotten publish (Her first book, ironically, was about an orphan looking for a place to call home), and was now returning to her apartment, shared with her roommate from college (They had worked so well together, they simply couldn't think of parting), in a peaceful, beautiful, bright town along the western coast. She had made new friends, ones who didn't care how she grew up, who didn't mind how she was strange and different, and sometimes barricaded from the rest of the world for periods of time. 

Looking out the car window, she saw she was going over a hill like road, and nearing the peak. Below her, glimmering golden lights of the town shimmered like glitter scattered carelessly over a black cloth. The moon and the stars timidly peaked out from behind some gentle violet, pink, blue clouds to say hello. As the road continued downwards, the view vanished, but it had stayed long enough for her to make her mind.

This. That view. Her apartment. Her friends. Those were home. She had traded her loneliness and wishes for lullabies and bedtime stories for uncontrollable laughter over movies shared over microwaved popcorn and cans of soda. She had traded locked doors and closed curtains for sun filled days at the beach or at the park with her friends. She had traded dead grass and wilted pretty pink flowers for beautiful stars both above and below her, displayed in all its shimmering glory against the deep, majestic blue of the night. 

At age twenty-two, she had found her home at last, and it wasn't her house, or her family, simply, where she belonged.