A house is a home when you feel safe, when you feel it is a place you can always go to. Oh I’ve lived in a lot of houses over my life, yet not a single home. I always just associated the A on the mountain as a symbol of home, because no matter where we went I could always see it from a window. We lived in Juarez with my dad, then my mom and I moved here to “get a proper education,” a valid reason, I guess. So many memories in so many places that I don’t remember very clearly, but the memory that remains the same everywhere we went was of me rushing to the front door every Saturday morning to see my dad arrive.
Because he wasn’t an American citizen, my dad lived in Juarez and could only visit. We could never afford a house because of their salaries both about minimum wage, and various otherlegal reasons. Moving from apartment to apartment to apartment complex to duplex was a hassle, and I especially hated packing. I hated having to stuff my stuffies into bags, I though they couldn’t breathe, and as soon as we got to the new place we would set up my bed and my shelves and I would organized them in the exact same way every time. Oh, I was a terrible hoarder too. I would keep all the clothes tags that I thought were pretty, and the packaging from toys, and the blowing-bubble bottles, and stickers still on sticker sheets, and even wrappers; and my mom would take all that and just throw it away. I thought it was so evil of her. Yep, I hated moving.
A miracle happened finally around my twelfth birthday, we could finally fix my dad’s papers for him to come live with us. For the process he had to live here but unemployed, and at the time we were living with my grandmother, but she made a hostile move and we had to leave. It hurts to know she thought that of him for over a decade. We moved again, in a record time of only one week. Here we lived for two years, and my dad lived with us, cooking, making stuff, becoming desperate and suffocated like a caged gazelle. Finally, time was up, papers were in, everything was finalized and we could get an actual house. It was great; not too big, not too small, a nice neighborhood, close enough to school, but not too close, just right. Moving again.But I don’t know it seemed different, like when you finally make the perfect cup of coffee and you want to make it again for someone else to try.
A house is a home when you feel safe, when you feel it is a place you can always go to. I feel safe here, and if I leave for college, I finally feel like they will still be here when I return. It’s been two years here and I’m finally settled with the thought that they won’t leave, that if I come back they will be here. I am glad. I am home.
This is so sweet and means so much to me. I move every year and I lived without my mother for a year, so I completely understand what it was like to live without your father. I love how you repeated the first sentence at the end. It shows how strongly you feel about your home and your family.
ReplyDeleteIt's true, "There's no place like home." It's a really good story and it really shows how you felt about what a "home" really was and if home even had to be a building
ReplyDelete