concepts of home

home is a noun, but not a place.

it is often associated with a space in which you temporarily reside — but everything is temporary.

home is more so a state — a set of circumstances; a way of being; a condition.

no matter which way you look at it, it has no set boundaries and is meant to differentiate itself from others.

growing up i always loved walking down the block to smell the lilacs when they bloomed in the spring.

i’d stick my face in the soft, billowing clusters and let the world drift far away.

i remember so vividly carrying bundles of these little cloud-flowers in my shirt and skipping down the block, humming to myself on the way home.

home is a timeless space, a place of refuge.

away from the physical home we seek this refuge in nostalgic and familiar places.

consider yourself in a bookstore filled with hundreds and thousands of weathered books you’d never be able to read in your lifetime.

suddenly, overcome by vellichor, you are whisked outside of time, each book a container for history, imagination, possibilities, and undiscovered fantasies.

sometimes, all it takes is a scent, a word, an image to unlock within yourself emotions you had long forgotten.

i didn’t consciously know the lilac city was my home. it is of little to no consequence. home is in the flowers, themselves.

back then, things seemed less complicated.

after spending years repressing the un-idyllic, i can no longer recall the hardships, only the feelings they left.

but i remember the lilacs; i remember the escape that they brought me.

traveling back and forth between parent homes, i’d measure the distance in the memorable lilac blushes

blurry puffs of pale purple zipped by through the passenger window, at least seven.

sometimes, our concepts of home are incongruous, contradictory.

where something pulls at your insides, making your stomach churn — if you let it.

in the absence of peace and understanding, cognitive dissonance only grows — weeds of the mind.

lilacs, unfortunately, have a very limited blooming period — about two weeks long, right when the weather warms.

they do not bloom again until the following spring.

not once did i question where they had gone once they stopped blooming and i always expected them to return.

something about them was reassuring — a reminder that time was still moving forward.

although i couldn’t fully grasp the concept, i always felt a lack of home — whether i was with mom or with dad.

unspoken but recognizable tension would send me over to the window — rain or sun, summer or winter — to dream about those lilacs.

i’d measure time by how much longer it would be until their sweet-scented purple came to visit again.

feeling at home is more fulfilling than rain after a drought.

recall how refreshing and relaxing a sudden cloudburst after a dry period can be.

perhaps it is the petrichor — that evocative, alluring, and almost irresistible scent laced with the indication of change.

people will universally welcome the rain, knowing it brings with it that feeling of relief.

i used to love dancing in the rain.

out in the street, feet bare, i’d wander underneath heavy drops.

the coming of rain meant that spring was well on its way, and the flowers would be back.

when the rain stops, a moment occurs that can bring anyone back to the present from whatever far-away place they had been.

finally, peace. finally, release. the feeling that everything will begin again — this is a cause for celebration.

being outside, breathing deeply — when stepping outside of your house is the only way to come home.

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