I Am A Home

I am a home. One that you decorate carefully and with love. I am a home that you spend years to fill the walls with pictures of the places you've gone and the people you love.

I am a home where you lay down your finest foreign rugs on my hardwood floors so that the ground doesn't make your toes prickle when you take off your shoes, or come downstairs for your morning coffee.

I am not a summer rental, one where you go when the weather is warm and the breeze is cool and you feel like the best version of yourself. You cannot leave me all year to gather dust and to let the ants and mice crawl across my floors looking for the scraps and crumbs you carelessly left. You cannot throw your extra things here and leave them only to come get them when it is convenient for you. I am not extra storage, I am not where you hide your secrets and the things you wish you had not done or said. I am not where you get extra drunk off warm beer and high off of the salt in the air or the rain on the porch. I am not the stories you tell about the weekends you spent with me, how they made you feel like you were not a part of the world for a while, and that coming back to "real life" always felt nice in the end.

I am not your cabin in the woods. I am not sitting around with no one for company hoping that one day you may pull up a dirt path and see me again. I will not wait to hear you hoot and holler about how long it has been, for you to run your fingers across me and to say, "You feel just the same as the last time I was here." I am not your retreat from how hectic life may get. I am not your dead zone so that calls may not go in or out and you can pretend that no one else exists but you and me and the quietness of the night. I am not here so that you can listen to birds chirp in the morning and feel the warmth of the sun on the floors when you've slept in a little too long.

I am a home. I am always here for you after a long day and you are here for me when the winds are howling outside and the thunder is crashing and there is nowhere else you can imagine being but here with me. I am a home where the roof leaks and you get up on your ladder that is stashed somewhere where cobwebs are aplenty and you find the holes and you patch them.

I am a home that does not asked to be taken care of but expects to be taken care of because my well being is yours. I am a home.

I am not a hotel room that creates the vague notion of home but never feels like home.

I am a home that waits for you to come back each day. You know my inner workings, where there are cracks in the wall and nicks on the floor, where the floorboards creak, and which light switches appear to have no purpose. You know that when it is cold out that I creak and groan and that in the summer the door is harder to close because I demand the breeze and the sunlight. I am where you wake up each day and when you are gone, I am where you long to be. I am not an escape from your life. I am everything you've built, the reason you've come this far, and the will to go on.