Inklings 2021

Or perhaps, home isn’t an idea of the future, rather a reality from the past. The middle school where I lost and found myself a thousand times, where music was my escape and I tried to be myself unapologetically yet found myself apologizing for the things I couldn’t control. I tried to find deeper meaning in trifling matters, instead of focusing on what was right in front of me. And if home is a person, or a group of people, then how do you know when they’re found? Is the sky any blue-er, the laughs any freer, the cold mornings any warmer? Does it feel like the burning butterflies that race through your body when you first make eye contact with the person you’ll grow to love? Maybe you feel it in increments. The glass seems half full instead of half empty more often than it used to. you start to see potential in the most mundane of things, and wish the floating feeling could last forever. Perhaps home is the city in which I was born, that I will always feel a connection to, but may need some time apart from after I graduate. When I come back, I’ll remember the wide streets my family and I used to bike on, before a pandemic kept us indoors. And the elegant houses my mom and I used to pass on our drives to school, when we’d blast songs from artists I don’t listen to anymore. Homes separated from the rest of the world by tall hedges and grand double doors, but now I realize the facades mean nothing. Perhaps we rely on home when we’re split into a million pieces, Hearts shattered in ways we thought unimaginable, Far from the dreams we hoped to achieve, Distanced from the people we once promised to never leave behind. Maybe home is never found, and instead is constantly changing like we are, so we call something home when we feel like we’re floating and need a grounding idea to fall down to. 8