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Where is home for you?

Where is home for me?

It’s a question I have struggled with since a knock on my door and a soft voice telling me to sit down.

The house that I had grown up in was no longer my home. I was now drifting, caught up in a storm of grief and loss with no proper shelter to hide from it.

Could home now be my friend’s house, with its constant sense of warmth and gentleness, I wondered? No. As much as I am loved there, I am an outsider and the sight of my friend with her daughter hurt. A reminder of what I’d lost.

Could home be my room on my university campus? Definitely not. The accommodation officer’s sympathy and kindness could only stretch so far.

A friend suggested I do a PhD. I loved the idea of continuing my studies. I decided to apply to Lancaster University. Once I had finally sold the house, a city I had never been to, in another country would become my home, I decided, the heady thrum of adventure and newness overwhelming worries that this wouldn’t work out.

It didn’t work out.

My home could not be in Lancaster, in the cold, troublesome house I’d rented. Darkness had crept in. It was suggested that I return to Swansea and the fragments of a support system I had there. I had to. My life depended on it.

Coming back to Swansea had all the comforting familiarity of a well-loved book. I felt lighter than I had done in over a year. The house sold. My support system began to grow. But as I watched the sea tide draw in and out, an itch bloomed in the back of my mind. The flat I had rented wasn’t home. I couldn’t decorate it. I was paying a ridiculous amount a month for it. I wanted, needed a place of my own.

I found a house. With the help of gentle prodding and stubborn firmness, hammer blow by hammer blow, paint stroke by paint stroke it began to feel like somewhere I could call mine.

I think I have found my home now. It isn’t complete yet. But it will be. And it’s not just made up of new furniture and soft carpet, but of love and exasperation and determination and most of all, the feeling that when I am swept away by the winds of wanderlust and curiosity, I will be glad to return.

Published 19th of September 2023