Let me come home

This is the start of a new blog. I won't tell you how many I've started and left to die because then you won't read this one. But this one has had a lot of thought put into it before starting it. And I'm also not a teenager blogging about my "prahblems" anymore. So it might just work out.

I don't like first posts. They're always a little awkward and cheesy so instead I'm going to start this blog off with some thoughts I've been having recently about the concept of home.

I've only moved once in my life: I was 13 and my family and I moved from Johannesburg to a little town in the Eastern Cape (very traums!). This isn't counting the time in April last year when we moved to the farm that my parents now live on. That didn't feel like a move for me because I was living in Grahamstown where I went to university anyway.

I digress.

My family has never been uprooted many times in my life to move from place to place or anything like that but my loved ones are scattered all over the country and the world. Which brings me to my ideas about home.

I no longer visualise home as a place. It isn't the rough-plastered walls of the home I grew up in in Benoni, or the house with the high-ceilings in Somerset East and it isn't the small farmhouse from which I type this post.

I am "at home" whenever I'm with my parents or my brother. When I am with my boyfriend or his family I am "at home" and the same goes for when I'm with friends whether at university or elsewhere. For the past 3 weeks home has been a small flat in Hannover, Germany where my boyfriend has been staying for the past 4 months. As of Friday my home will be his family's house in Port Elizabeth.

Home is not a place and it is does not have one meaning. It will always have many meanings. I remember saying to someone, after leaving (one) home to go back to university for the semester, that it felt like my heart was broken in the nicest way. While I was sad to leave my parents and brother, I was so thrilled to go back to university, another home. I said then that my heart was scattered all over the country and it still is. I'd actually like to correct myself and say all over the world. Which is sad but really awesome at the same time because I have even more homes to be a part of! How great??

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros sing that "home is wherever I'm with you" and it pretty much sums up everything I've blabbered on about above. So I'll just leave you with the song in case you scrolled straight past said blabber.

Kbye
x