Home

I keep wondering when I'm going to stop feeling as if every misfortune that happens to me is punishment. Or justly deserved consequences. I keep wondering when I'm going to stop believing that I will never build a home because I don't deserve to have one.

It feels like a piece of me was stolen today. I feel so hopeless when I think of my foolish dreams, of this idea that I was building a future, a home, one piece of furniture at the time. A bookshelf now, then a bureau, then a desk, plants, a little more mortar each time.I could tell myself that my life had worth because I was building and adding and accumulating and what I now feel is that the only thing that can possibly give me worth is whatever I have managed to accumulate within myself because all other things are transitory.

That is so completely true that it frightens me. There is no further security, that is what you find when you move past illusions: the only thing of true worth in your life is you, the person you are. And it's the only thing you can never be sure about. You can buy good furniture. You can get a little house of your own. You can graduate and have a degree. But all these things mean nothing if you cannot make something of yourself. Why would I have thought of that when it's so much easier to gauge the quality of a bookshelf's wood than it is to gauge the quality of a person's character?

When I thought that this one piece of furniture was taken from me, this is what I thought. This is how I felt. I felt that a part of me, of who I am, of the home within me was gone. It had been taken away. Alongside the despair, there's been a lot of anger too, a lot of wanting to blame someone, especially myself. There was a lot of loneliness, most of it fixed on Saturday night, a lot of wondering what I was going to do now that I'm all alone in my own head.

But I think a lot of it has also been realizing how much things have NOT changed, and that this loneliness is the simple nature of the human condition; a fact often disguised in the illusion that love gives, the illusion of traveling through the journey of your life with somebody. I'm letting go of that illusion. I'm learning what home means and how much of it is made, solely, of my own self.