"of all the things i've lost… i miss my mind the most" …

So I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘home’ and what that means, exactly. This isn’t something that’s just occurred to me to ask myself, I’ve been asking it forever, and I think I’ve finally figured out some really important things that have probably been totally obvious to everyone else the whole time.

I was born in one province, and in the first 4 years of my life lived between that province and another, as well as another state in another country. Eventually, my family settled in a place that makes it clear that you never really belong or can consider your ‘from’ there unless you were born there. I’ve spent a long time trying to decide if this has been upsetting to me, because if that was the case, then I wasn’t really ‘from’ anywhere, apparently. I was born, and then started my journey. Actually, I understated how much that has bothered me over the years. ‘What is your hometown?’ I don’t know… I obviously thought about it way too much and let stubborn, hard-fixed small town mindsets influence me a great deal, but I was still growing.

So then I went through a million different phases of ‘self-creation’ – “Home is wherever I happen to be’, I AM my own home……” etc. etc.

I’m here, spending my first real night back at ‘home’ after being gone for 2.5 months, and I honestly can’t say I missed it. That can’t make it home. I missed a lot of my stuff because there are good memories that come with it or because being surrounded by things that have become important to me like photos, drawings my child has made that I’ve framed, things I’ve made or discovered in various places, my books, souvenirs from important journeys, my mattress, etc. makes me feel more content than living in someone else’s home or a hotel or wherever else, but stuff can be taken anywhere, and, in the end, is just stuff. More stuff can always be… collected.

I haven’t missed my house, I haven’t missed this town, I haven’t missed anything about being or living here whatsoever. So yeah, maybe I don’t belong here, maybe I’ll never be ‘from’ here, maybe this isn’t my home, and maybe I’m finally at peace with that, happy about that, because maybe I would feel worse if I was actually accepted somewhere and felt the desire to reject it.

But my daughter has missed her house. Her playroom. Her cats, her bathtub, her stuff, her bed that she never sleeps in, being familiar, it’s just hers, and I get that. She’s not from here, she wasn’t born here, she’s 2.5 and she’s lived in 2 major cities and 1 small town. But this is her home. I’m ok with being wherever her heart is, because I want to give her whatever her heart desires. Not whatever she wants, but the desires of her heart. Right now, she just desires home, whatever she has defined it to be, and that’s here.

“Home is where the heart is.”

What does that MEAN?

For years, I found many different ways of taking this. For example, I could take it exactly the way I expressed above – my daughter is the love of my life, the reason I push through the worst of my days, the motivation for my goals, the one person in the world I want to be most proud to have me in the end, my attitude adjustment, my LIFE adjustment, my everything. I could definitely refer to her as my heart, and therefore, no matter where I am, as long as she’s there, I’m home.

I’ve also taken it literally, as I referred to earlier. ‘Home is where the heart is’. Well, ‘the heart’, MY heart, is in my chest. I am home. If I can find a way to be comfortable with myself, develop confidence, or even if I don’t, radically accept my flaws and limitations, then this vessel, my body, this is my home. My home is wherever I am. I am settled, I am on the move. I stop, I go, I stay, I leave, I grow restless, I never wait for long before I find a new place to escape to. Home, home, home, home. Me.

But now, I finally get it. Because I’ve never lived anywhere in my life where I’ve felt like I truly belonged. Nowhere that allowed me to walk down the street and feel like a working vein in the beating heart of my city. Like when something happened there, it wasn’t happening to the place, it was happening to ‘us’, and we were united. I never felt like I knew a place so well. I never felt like I understood the unspoken language, the body language of a city. I always felt like there was a lifetime of cultivation that it was always too late for me to come by, a sad ache because I almost loved a place, but I loved it at arm’s length, from the outside, a good friend visiting, a cousin from out of town who was staying for a long while. I never ‘got’ the language of a city. I never bothered to memorize every block and corner, because I never considered staying. It was never mine.

A working vein in the heart of my city. Home, is where the heart is. New York City is where my heart is. It took such a short amount of time, but I gave myself to it completely. I know what it means now. It’s not a person, it’s not yourself, it’s the place your heart longs to return to, the one place you hold so close it leaves marks on your skin, it digs in and wounds you as you cling to it from a distance when you can’t be there. It’s the place you may leave but you always want to be, it’s the place you may leave forever, but can’t shake or compare or remake in feeling. It’s where your heart is. You took it out and left it there and you’ll never find it again, it’s hidden somewhere in the parks or streets or tops of buildings, always moving.

I go back often, and I sense my heart. I know I’m close to it. There are different kinds of hearts; one is made for the unconditional love of your children, one is made to point you in the direction of the person you know you’ll love and its magnetism will pull their love back to it if it’s meant to be. One is made for compassion, empathy towards strangers, making the world around you a better place by loving the loveless and helping the helpless. Not enough people are in touch with that heart. But only one is made to be a compass, a guide to find home.

I go back to Manhattan and I walk its streets and I feel my heart there, and it’s joyous. But it aches. We’re not meant to be separated from our hearts. Not forever. Not if it’s what we don’t want. As the days go by and I know my working vein has collapsed for the time being, the one part of the city’s beating heart, I know I no longer belong. My heart still wanders and I can’t find it, I don’t want to. I’m content to visit it forever. But it gets stronger when I’m not there. it aches and cracks when I come to visit, and breaks a little every time I have to leave it behind again. We miss each other.

I guess I just wanted to say, that although I know exactly where I’m planted for the time being, I’ve finally figured out where my home is. My home is in Manhattan. My home is where my heart is. My heart is in New York. I LOVE New York. I could try to make you understand why, and someday I’ll be able to put it into words. It has nothing to do with the traditional reasons I’m sure many people have for loving it. But I was barely breathing when I moved there. The City revived me. It has caused me tremendous pain and it has healed me, matured me, made me, taught me lessons I refused to learn on my own. Nowhere else has done that.

The City. My City. Keep my heart. Take it. I know you won’t lose it, I know it’s safe in your streets. I know it will be waiting for me, I know I will be back. Home, after all, is where the heart is. Everyone goes home eventually.