Home Is Where the Heart Is

     This morning JP asked, "Does time go slow or does time go fast?"

     Walking down the streets of Florence at sunset, thinking about the last three weeks, I found my answer: the answer is that time goes. Not fast or slow; it just goes. Always, no matter what. 

     Three weeks ago, I was lying in bed, crying and wondering how I could possibly survive the next 24 days. And now here I am with only four days to go, and I haven't cried or felt miserable in a long while. That night three weeks ago feels like both a lifetime ago and the blink of an eye, as if it's equally possible that I would need a time machine or a sneeze to get back to it. That was a terrible analogy. The point is that just when you think that time cannot possibly go fast enough to get you to the place where you think you'll be happy (in my case, back home), you'll look up one evening and realize that you're happy and you don't know how it happened. Time didn't speed up for you. It didn't even bring you back home. It just went, and you went along with it, and it took you where you needed to be. 

     I've been thinking about college a lot lately and what my English teacher said at the end of the year, about how just when you think you can't take it anymore, when you're so homesick you can't breathe and all you want to do is go home and see your family and friends: don't go home. Stay. Because staying is the only thing that will take the homesickness away. Staying in a place that is making you miserable is sometimes the only way to not be miserable. Staying will force you to find beauty in this new and foreign land; staying will force you to make friends with people you had no intention of having prolonged conversations with; staying will force you to change your definition of "home". When we go off to college or work or the military or whatever life has in store for us in August, the pull towards "home" will never go away unless we decide to make "home" a feeling and not a destination. 

     I know this post is cheesy. Just bare with me for a moment. I haven't slept in my own bed since June 21st; haven't seen my friends or hugged my mom or felt Murph curl up in the crook of my knees at night or fought with my brother or gone to the Dixie or driven my car or swam in AP's pool or made fun of my dad or sat on the porch with my grandma while she smoked a cigarette.   I miss it. That's home. But then there's this home that I've found inside of myself that is content to just be here, to be alone. To not have my bed or my family or my friends or my annoying cat. And I've found a way to miss these things in a way that makes me happy instead of miserable. I've found a way to feel "home" even when I'm not. If I hadn't I would've had a truly awful time. And while this vacation has been far (so far) from perfect, it's been good. And I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for the girl who sometimes doesn't think things through, the girl who last fall said "I'll go!" when her brother declined an all-expense-paid trip to France and Italy. Because sometimes she gets me to good places. 

     (I know that I'm going to totally regret this post in a few months when I'm bawling my eyes out in college because I have no friends and I miss my mom and home is not a freaking "feeling" that "resides in my being" or whatever BS I just spewed. It sounded good in my head.)

     Here are some pictures of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa:

Day 961 Song Recommendation: "Make It Up" by Shura. 

-SE Wagner