Going Home?

Home?

Home is where you hang your hat. Or where your heart is. Or maybe it's just the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

(By the way, in case you weren't sure, this is going to be a more introspective post than usual. I'll return to proper Prague blogging soon.)

Tomorrow morning, as I am writing this, I leave Prague for the US for the first time since I arrived here 27 months ago. Most of my friends and colleagues have referred to it as going "home." One fellow teacher, who has been in Prague over a decade, noticed that, about 6 months ago, I called the States "home." Was this just linguistic convenience, or some sort of Freudian reveal, which he took it to be?

English has a lot of ways of talking about what home is, and for the different kind of places that can be "home." There's hometown, homeland, adopted home, plus the more legalistic concepts of "permanent address" and "legal residence." We can feel "at home" in a place we've never been to, and, of course, we all know there's no place like it.

So, where is home, for me? Well, my hometown is Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where I never truly felt at home, even though, as a teenager, I had my one proper case of teenage rebellion when I was told we were moving away. End result: I stayed, graduated from high school, left as soon as I could, and I have rarely returned and have no plans to do so again, at least not for the town's sake. So, hometown, but certainly not home.

The first time I truly felt "at home" was probably in college, in Annapolis, Maryland at St. John's College. I came out, I made friends, I had the first of my skinny phases: life was good. Sure, I was broker than broke and going through a ridiculous amount of adolescent angst, but so what? As Sondheim wrote, "Life was fun, but oh so intense. / Everything was possible, and nothing made sense."  I felt as if the campus, and even the town, were mine--there's a reason it's called "Homecoming." And so, while I never lived in one room or place for longer than a year, my 5 years there (4 in school, 1 working after) feel like "home" in my memory. Importantly, though, while I have visited since I left, it has never truly felt like going home--it has new residents now, new people going through the same program, the same dramas, the same growing pains that my friends and I did. It's their home now. It's only mine in my memory.

My next adopted home--and the first I chose for its own sake (though that oversimplifies the story) was Washington, DC. Well, Alexandria, Virginia, to be exact. Though I lived and worked in the area for 15 years (!), I never once lived in the District, proper. But as anyone from DC will tell you, trying to distinguish between the near suburbs and the District is pretty fruitless, especially since it's common to travel all over the metro region to work or see friends. (The big DC distinction, of course, is whether you're inside or outside the Beltway; for the record, I was outside for 12 years, inside for 3.)

Was Alexandria home? Well, for the first 12 years I, quite literally, lived in someone else's home. I rented a room--two rooms, eventually--and shared the living space, but it was never *mine*. I always felt like something of a long-term guest. However, that didn't really extend to the rest of the DC area, which very much felt like home, especially after the first few years when I had finally finished adolescence. So, when I moved into my first solo place--at the age of 35--in a neighborhood I already knew, in a town I already loved, surrounded by friends I'd known for years and working at my longest-held job, well...I felt as if I'd come home at last.

And then, just three years later, I left it all behind and moved abroad.

Of course, again, the reasons for this are complicated (personal health issues were at play), but, fundamentally, I kinda discovered I wasn't a "home" person--at least not in the sense of "house and home." I spent thousands filling my flat (read: apartment--my English is slowly becoming more British) with the perfect furniture. I hosted parties. I had house guests. I had a life full of habit, routine, familiarity, and comfort. And a large part of me found it stifling. I became the person who starts planning his next trip as soon as the last one ends. I had made a home for myself, and I spent my time thinking about how to get away from it.

So, when the crisis moment came and my life was upended, starting over somewhere else didn't just seem possible, it seemed the right thing to do. After a rather aimless year trying to get into grad school so I could become an English professor (oh, the irony), I jumped on the suggestion a friend made of teaching English abroad. I had always felt a vocation for teaching, and had a love of language and travel, so it was clear that sacrificing home for happiness was the best choice.

Now that I've been here for two years, is Prague home? Maybe. Honestly, I don't know how to answer that question anymore. After 40 years, I have accepted that I am not a "home" person in any sense. It took me far too long to realize why Odysseus and The Doctor were two of my favorite fictional characters: they're permanent travelers. People forget that, at the end of The Odyssey, after spending 20 years away, and returning home to his loving wife, now-grown son, and aging father, Odysseus is off again. There's always more to see. Same with the Doctor; tellingly, at the very end of the classic series in Doctor Who, when the companion says she wants to go "home," the Doctor says, "Home?," worried she wants to give up travelling. But the home they both mean is the TARDIS, the magical box they use to travel through space and time--the Doctor's home is a ship, not a place. Home is travel. Maybe, in the end, what I will find--and perhaps have found already--isn't so much a home as a home base: a place to return to to recharge and replenish before setting off again.

So, am I going home? No, I don't think I am, not with all that entails. But I'm not leaving home, either.

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