Back Home

Sunday, I'm going back home. Back to Massachusetts, my first home. And even though I say I'm going back home, in reality, it's not so simple. 

If there is anything that I have learned about leaving the place where I grew up, first when I left to go to university and then when I left to go to Paris, is that what I consider home cannot be limited to once place. 

3. That's the number of homes I now have. The number of places where I've woken up day after day to live my life. 3 places where I know the smells,  the sounds. 3 places where I've grown roots, made connections with people, with places . Massachusetts, DC, Paris. 

I always thought that a person's home is where they were whole. The place which encompassed their whole life- their family, and friends, and work, their possessions. 

Now, I know that I can never be whole in any of my homes. One place does not encompass my whole life. I've left pieces of me scattered in three different locations. I'll never be able to pick them up and put them back together. 

At 18, I moved away. And I missed my home. I thought of the sound of cars rushing down the street at night , of the crickets chirping outside my window, of the night time news that my father watched as I fell asleep.  I thought of the smell of freshly mown grass, of pine, of the outside before it began to snow, of spices that filled the house while my mother cooked. I wasn't whole where I was, a whole part of me was in a different place. 

And then I returned home. And I thought everything would be the same as it was. But I'd lie in bed with the sound of my father watching television and the smell of the dinner my mother had just cooked and I'd think of DC. Of the sound of helicopters over my head,  the pulse of the metro reverberating throughout the city, the dusty smell of my dorm. Things weren't the same. I built another home miles away, and the two could never be reconciled, could never become one. 

And this week I'll go back to my first home and I'll lie in bed and think of Paris in addition to DC. I'll think of the smell of cigarettes that was impossible to avoid, the smell of autumn and leaves, even the smell of urine- in the metro, along the Seine, in every alley. I'll think of the sound of children playing in park 12 stories below my window, the sound of my host mother's telephone which so often woke me up, and of sirens constantly ringing throughout the city.   

And I'll know that Paris was my home, even if it was only for a little while, and even if I was never whole there.