Leaving the nest.

I'm comin' home!
(because)
Home is where the heart is
(and)
there's no place like home.
(oh)
Homeward bound: I wish i was!
(what?)
Who says you can't go home?
(fact:)
You can't grow up at home.

*

Since I've moved out of state for college, going home is much different than it used to be. I made the decision to leave, so I brought all this change upon myself. I guess the benefits outweighed the losses at the time. Every time I go home I soak in the familiar: the rooms just where I left them, the grandfather clock still not ticking, the pictures in the hallway, the out of tune piano, the most beautiful backyard I've ever seen still waiting for its baby to come home to play. Sometimes I come home and the wallpaper's gone and there's fresh paint on the walls. Sometimes the furniture's been rearranged. Home will always be home: it'll always be what makes me comfortable and happy and where I feel most comfortable being me, but it'll always be changing, and I'm learning that you can't just fall in love with home as it is one way and leave it at that. You have to be continually getting to know and falling in love with home as it changes. It'll never stay the same as it was when you were its baby. (Though you'll always be its baby.) I want to go home: home the way I remember it way back when. But I know I can't stay anymore, and I know I can only have it in small doses: but I'll soak in those small doses and appreciate them for what they are and learn to love the changes, because the changes are now apart of what home is too. And they're good! Someday I'll go home for good. The changes will be extreme. But until that time that I have a home to go home to for good, I will visit and reminisce because I love what it was, I love what it's becoming, and I don't want to leave it for so long that it changes into something I don't know. And I certainly don't want it to forget me.

A friend of mine played this song the other day. Isn't it just marvelous?

Us college students know we can't come home. We've got growing up to do.

The "poem" in the beginning is a collection of lines from songs and movies and I don't know what, some of which I can't remember the titles to and don't feel like looking up. The only thing's that're mine are the words in parentheses and the last line.

3/26/11