It's weird, sometimes, when people ask me where I live. I really don't quite know what to say. Like when people ask me what I do – how do you explain 'blogger' to people who don't know what blogs are?
But the home question is odder. Most people have a home. Technically, I do too – I have a place where all my stuff is, a place where I live when I am not away, but I find myself hesitant to call it home, because that confers too permanent a status on it. When the business went pfft a year and a half ago, I had no choice but to go stay with my family, but although it's where I live, and I get on just fine with my parents so there's no issue living there, it's not home. I am spending increasing amounts of time not there, and the more I'm not there the more it becomes clear that it's not my home. It's not where my heart is.
Right now, I don't know where home is. I've been quite nomadic since the summer of last year, with two solid months and various short stints in London, weeks in Arundel, trips to the States and Canada, and the more I move about the more I realise that I am homeless. Not without housing, but without a home. It doesn't matter too much – so long as I have my laptop and my internet connection I can get 95% of my work done, and I'm trying to get rid of that irksome 5% that requires resources currently located in a small room in Dorset.
I'm not even sure I know where I want home to be. I used to want to move back to London but that seems impossible now. The rents are too expensive and my intention is to be spending time abroad this year, although to what extent I can realise depends upon factors beyond my control.
Part of me likes this rootlessness, part of me hates it. Eighty percent of my belongings have been in boxes for the last 18 months and I have, frankly, forgotten what I own. You could torch the lot, and I wouldn't know what had gone up in flames. That, in itself, feels odd. Every now and again I think about buying something, only to realise I already have it. Somewhere. In a box.
One good thing in all this is that I do know where my heart is. Unfortunately, my body has been unable to keep up. Maybe that explains these current feelings of discombobulation.
UPDATE: Kevin just said 'Your home is here. Online.' I guess he has a strong point.
Home
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I've never felt that any particular place is “home” either, just “where I live”. Maybe “Home” has more to do with the people you are with rather than where you are.
Or something.
I've felt like that for some time. I've moved twelve times in the last six years. I've often told people that as long as I have an internet connection, I feel at home. A great percentage of the people who are really important to me don't live here; they live in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Washington, Indiana and… Dorset, or, like, wherever.
Your home, like mine (i share so many of those thoughts, all the time) is here online. Our friends are global, our lives are online.
I don't think it's such a bad thing, really.
Although sometimes we get lonely, we are never alone.
gw
For all my travel I consider my current residence home, which is nice, but considering home many years I didn't live here. I can understand.
Thanks for all the comments, guys. it's nice to know I'm not completely out of my gourd for feeling like that sometimes. Maybe the reason I felt so disconnected was because I have recently been much more, well, disconnected than I usually am. Funny, never thought not being so much online would result in me feeling lost offline.
Home is where the majority of my computers are placed 🙂
Personally, home is where the majority of the guitars are kept.
Note : NOT the amps, though, otherwise home would be a very smelly cellar with lots of empty bottles.
Then again…
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