Home away from Everywhere Else
Rip. Pour. Stir. “Cheers.” Take a sip and smile.
As Casey and I drink our matching espressos we catch up on the times. The rainy weather outside. The encroaching snow. Recent discoveries in music. Love for the electric guitar and overdrive. This is not home away from home, but it is home. The very place. One that doesn’t exist geographically, as much as it does relationally. History precedes this conversation and these now finished espresso cups—enjoyed to the last caramelly drop.
Long-term relationships bring so much comfort these days. We’ve spent so much time in the last year surrounded by new friends in new places, that it’s always refreshing to find someone from the past. Someone who knows you, or at least who you were, once, and who doesn’t go looking for you to define who you’ve become since your last visit. Someone who will accept you, no matter. Who will love you, even if you left your good shirt at that place you call home—those four walls, now 800 miles away.
I prefer to take my home with me. On the road. And no, I’m not talking about buying an RV. (Besides, I always preferred the model of the hobo, the nomad, the backpacking-hitchhiking adventurist with neither compass nor map in hand.) Even though my grandparents have always had an RV, and I’m currently staying the week in a recreational-fifth-wheel-trailer/guest-house, I still find it kind of amusing how we’ve created numerous ways to make fully functional houses-on-wheels in order to bring all the comfort and security that we’re used to having at home with us on our next family adventure, wherever that might be. Is “Home” defined by the people you have near you, or your access to a microwave oven and a campsite with Wi-Fi? (Really, they have those? If that thought gets you excited, then I’m happy you’re reading this with me. Keep reading.)
I want to redefine Home as the space in which I exist at this moment. The room I’m sitting in, or the sidewalk I’m walking down—the 20’x20’ bubble around me, and anyone or anything I may find in that space. If you’re close enough for me to see you, and make eye contact or say “hello”, then I’m at home and you’re at home with me and we can be free to be free. To be as vulnerable and honest as we can get. To say what comes to mind, not just what’s polite. And to speak love into those matching spaces that surround the two of us.
I’m far from a home that is only four walls and a television. I now want it to exist wherever there is a friend—whether one old, or brand-spanking new.
I want to be your friend.
Welcome to my Home.
[drew:espresso in hand, @the cool bean cafe, Oakhurst]
