I oftentimes find myself lost in a Hallmark movie daydream. Quiet little quirky town with streets lined with beautiful Christmas lights. Little shops where the owners have been there for years and know you by name, your momma by name, and your grandmomma by name. It is a place where every tension is neatly solved by the end of the time frame allotted for this little escape from reality.
What I quickly realize is the role I play in this reality is the newcomer, the outsider, the kid in town that no one quite knows what to make of. While not a villain, just the misunderstood stranger. I would love to say that life is full of happy Hallmark endings, but that would just not be true. Sometimes the tension remains and remains and goes unchanged, unresolved.
As that lost highway traveler, I have often picked up my bag and headed to the next quiet small town. While with every move I hope for a different outcome, it always seems to end the same, another place to lay my head, but no place to call home. My existence as a vagrant continues and carries on. No place to call home.
What is the affect of not knowing where home is? What is the result of the individual who has worn the holes in shoes and in his soul? I often see that picture in the looking glass of my life. Maybe all the searching, maybe all the people who have come and gone in my life, maybe what I am looking for is home. Maybe home is not the quiet little village with Joe's Bar & Grilll and Cuties Bakery on the corner. What I really believe I looking for is a place where I am me.
Home for most creates an anchoring point, a reference that reminds you where you are from, where you have been. Home for most is place of returning that allows for a proper reflection of the person you have become balanced against the person you were. What I seemingly have is suitcase full of momentary polariod memories of places I have lived. Each had a house and family and people I called friends, but none of them are home. Life has been much like a two-man canoe trying to sail in the ocean. It is the wrong craft for the environment being faced. The little boat cannot handle the waves that overtake you. There is no anchor to keep you in place. And fight and fight as you will against the tide, it just carries you further and further away from where you have been...the previous place you tried to call home.
The constant beating of the waves just leaves you weary and lost with no anchor to drop. What you realize is you have no idea where you are, where you are going and not really sure that where you have been is where you were supposed to be in the first place.
When you don't know where home is you end up anywhere and everywhere all at the same time, you end up someone, but no one. When you don't know where home is you never seem to gather the truth about who you are but live with the constant shifting of becoming who you think everyone wants you to be. You shape shift into to the person you believe everyone will accept you as. And with each different version of yourself you become, the person you were intended to become gets filed down as some sculpture that was intended to be a masterpiece, but is simply a mimic of several other works of art. Too many hands have grabbed hold you and reshaped and reshaped the clay of your life into what they want you be. In hopes of becoming something great, you let them. You become a quilt of leftover patches from other peoples hopes and dreams for your life. The seams are crooked, but secure enough that they keep you sewed into the image they place on you, all when you don't know where home is!
