Once Upon a Home

Home. What is home? What does it mean? The very word itself evokes different emotions and responses from different people. To some it is synonymous with birthplace. To others, the place one returns to after a hard day’s work. It may remind some of their homeland, long abandoned in the search for a better life, or the pivotal nest where family awaits. It can be a physical location or where someone is waiting for you.

Curiously, it seems that, the farthest one is from their home, the more it expands. Talk with someone on your town, village or city and home will be close – it’s an apartment or a singular house. “Just around the corner and up the street”, you’ll say. However, travel a few miles and your home is suddenly an entire locale – the whole village, town or city. And the further one gets, the larger it grows – your region, your country - until you end up calling yourself an European – or an American, or Asian, and your home is all that.

Yet, home can change. It grows as you do. It changes and transforms. A person might be born somewhere, then grow up somewhere else entirely, and end up settling and establishing family in a third, foreign place. And yet he’ll always have a home – whichever it may be.

To me, home is where you return to, where you feel safe and can relax. It is where you can rest and be ready to face the world once more the next day. It is a sanctum, a place of refuge.

In the end, I believe that is what home truly means: where you feel you belong. Where you can say: “This is my home”. But there is no rule, no rigid formula through which home can be determined. No one can tell you where your home is.

You just feel it.

And it feels like home.

Luís A. R. Bernardino