Home is everywhere. Part II

Day 28: Do you feel at home in your home? Is home a place for you? A book? A thing? A person? What would you want your home to be?

Home is everywhere, where your heart is and has been. Home can be a place, a thing, or a person. What makes something, someplace, or someone home is love, comfort, and connection.

For a place, I believe that everywhere I’ve been to that I loved and treasured, particularly Olongapo City, Manila, New York, Berlin, London, and DC, have a portion of my heart allotted only for them and that’s what make those places home. For a thing, like a book or a journal that will always have me in a moment of happiness, loneliness, pain or struggle, they are home for I am forever connected to them through a memories and a string of emotions. And for a person, home is someone who sees me in my true colors and across layers and chooses to love me nevertheless.

Home is really where the heart is. And when your heart lies in many different places in the world, disguised in different things, found in different people, then home is everywhere.

(From the Amateur Philosopher’s 42-Day Challenge)

Home is everywhere.

In the places that I’ve been to, I am grateful to have built new friendships and families. For someone who has been through a lot, I learned that home is all about these connections I’ve made with people from different walks of life, who have made me feel at home in a way of their own.

It’s home watching cable TV in my friend, Aiko’s, condo back in the Philippines. It’s home sharing Kaye’s food for dinner with my dormmates in Katipunan. It’s home in Caf Up hoarding one long lunch table for G1 and FOG1s in that beautiful place in Loyola Heights. It’s home doing laundry with my new sister, Meg, in our foster home in Berlin. It’s home in the student cafeteria with my study tour buddies making exaggerated noise over lunch just to piss off Germans. It’s home laughing with my foster parents, Steffi and Carl, over our interpretation of the words beobachtet and schoerle.

It’s home in Prague while walking up cobbled roads, marveling at the amazing architecture and absinthe chocolate in hand! It’s home eating that scrumptious hazelnut & strawberry-banana gelato in Innsbruck. It’s home in Bremen biking up and down trails at a park with my bestfriend. It’s home being free in Amsterdam. It’s home in Rome getting lost in the Colosseum.

It’s home up in the air seeing islands looking like paper cut-outs. It’s home in the plane watching Argo and discussing it with an interested seatmate. It’s home partying my ass off until 6 in the morning in Ministry of Sound with Erika and Sandy. It’s home in that red doubledecker bus with my cousin, eating M&S chips waiting for our stop. It’s home in Hyde Park watching swans and scary-looking ducks waddle about while feeding pigeons and running after them.

And it’s home here in Rockville watching my mom and brothers make fun of my dad sing to She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals. I can’t believe I’m saying this but home is really where the heart is. And when your heart lies in many different places in the world, home is everywhere.

I want to go home.

The traveling I have done in the past month has been an amazing gift. It has given me so much ecstasy and joy. But as I move to the second month of my vacation, things are taking a turn. Seriously, I am so tired of moving. I just want to lay my luggages down, take all my clothes out and finally put it in a closet that I call mine. I just want to lie in a bed which is not suit for a guest, but a bed that is mine. I want to drink morning coffee from my own cup. I want to sit on the sofa, in front of the TV, and stay there the whole day without thinking about the time I’m wasting, time that could have been spent better outside sitting on London’s beautiful parks. Why am I having a difficult time liking it here? I try so hard to appreciate all the beautiful landscapes, buildings, streets that I feel bad because London is such a lovely city. Maybe the timing isn’t right. I’m just so tired from all the traveling. Seeing new places has bored me, that I just want to go home.

But where is home?