How do you find a home in yourself? I am embarrassingly too old to be asking anyone this question, let alone a stranger on the internet. And I don't really expect an answer..but I wonder. My parents are moving out of what was my last 'childhood home' tomorrow. We moved a lot, but this place has been a home more than any other, and it has dear memories in its foundations. It also housed a lot of pain and changes, since it was a place where I realized that my life won't be as picture-perfect as I imagined it to be, and where I found out it's never going to play out the way five-year-old Jasper imagined it. But it was home, and it was a refuge I could run to when I moved away to my own place miles away. It was a constant where things didn't change and work wasn't drowning me and people weren't awful. It was suspended in time and it was the place where my mother's arms were always open, and my sofa bed was still ready and made, and it was a safe place to hide from the world when it became too much for my sensitive soul. And now it's gone.
Home isn't a place. It's a feeling and it is people. But it is also home-made food and the veggies from the garden out back. It's the smell of old wooden beams, and familiar sounds of creaking stairwells - that particular stair that wouldn't stop squeaking no matter what you did with it. It's a hole in the wall from a nail which held up your favourite painting, and it's roof windows that prevented you from sleeping whenever it rained. It's a tiny secret compartment behind my bed where I stashed a cigarette and a rose my first girl crush gave me. It is scratches on the floor where your old piano used to be. I look around my generic apartment, full of basic mismatched Ikea furniture and tchotchkes I've collected, trying to replicate that feeling of a place where love lives, where true life happens, where memories are made, and my heart overflows with sadness.
Can it be that I'm mourning my childhood again? There will be other houses. Other rooms. My parents aren't gone.
And yet.
How do you replicate that feeling once it's gone? How do you create it for yourself? How do you create it in yourself?
How do you make a home in yourself, so nobody can sell it?