The Idea of Home

Hi readers!

Currently, I am enjoying my spring break so I would have plenty extra time to write on my blog. In this post, I would like to take on the idea of home. Hope y'all enjoy it!

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People say that there is no place like home. The place where we enjoyed our childhood, the place where we grow up, the place where we have so many friends and memories. This notion would be 100 percent correct for most people. Why most people? Because some of us has traveled such a long way and could not find place like home.

This idea struck me when I had a conversation with a tutor at the university writing center. She asked me, where I would like to be after college? Yes, many people have asked me this question and it is still long way to go. It is a tough question for me because I do not have the answer and because I could not control what will happen to me after college. She told me about her husband who went to college in New York and now living in the United States. Currently, her husband misses Turkey yet he had spent more time in the US than in Turkey. Funny story, once when he was younger, he sent a mail to his parent in English. He did not remember that his parent do not speak any English.

What about me?
I had left my hometown after I graduate from junior high school. I was fifteen. I had to go to school three hours away from my home, and I only went home once every four months. Now, I am living in the US, and I only went home once in a year. I realize it when I went back home to Indonesia last summer, I met with some of my old friends but I realize that it is hard to maintain conversation - we just catch up on each other. Then I did not have much to talk about. Coming back to my hometown, everything seemed very different. People and places that were once familiar to me, were not familiar anymore. Does people and my hometown have changed? Or is it me who changed so much?

I do not know. What I know is that a place that once I called home does not feel as home-y as before. I am just 20 years old and I have spent a quarter of my life away from the place I grew up. I am excited with my life, but sometimes I am afraid. What if one day I might not have a place that I could call "home"?

"When you finally go back to your old home, you find it
wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood." -Sam Ewing-