Home-less

I’m the youngest of three children. My two older sisters and I all went to college. My parents always talked about retiring and moving to the Chesapeake Bay when we were all done with school, but because of good pensions (my parents both work for the city) they were able to retire a few years earlier then they had expected. My mom retired after her school year was over, and my dad followed not too long after. With no one at home and no jobs tying them down, my parents sold the house that I lived in since I was six months old this summer. I literally cannot go home again.

Over Thanksgiving break, my friends from high school were all back in my home town in rural western Maryland. While they were all in the houses they grew up in, I was a half hour away in the house my mom inherited when her parents passed away. It was my parents, my dog and me all fighting for space in a two-bedroom townhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore. I have very fond memories of my grandparents’ house, but I would never consider it home.

This past Friday, while I was back at “home,” my best friend from high school invited me to come over. I wanted to see my friend but with gas hovering at $3.00 a gallon and I decided against making the trip. I had seen him on Wednesday at our unofficial class reunion at a local Mexican bar, so I wasn’t betraying a friend by not seeing him over break. What surprised me was that I wasn’t even upset. I knew exactly what happened before I even talked to him the next day. He and two of my other friends sat in his basement and took shots of vodka from the bottle as they watched the Boise St-Hawaii game.

If I still had a house in my hometown I would have been right there next to them. I would have drunk heavily and laughed about old times. Instead, I met up with another group of friends at a bar. I dressed up because it was an upscale bar and cut myself off early because I had to drive and unlike my basement drinking days, I made a conscious decision to go to sleep rather than chug liquor until I collapsed to the floor.

I have a lease for my house in Wilmington until August and a place to stay whenever I go back to Maryland, but I still consider myself “home”-less. I have only a few memories of my grandparents’ house and those are only good ones. They pale in comparison, in number and range, to the memories I have of the house I grew up in. Your real home has to have the good and the bad experiences that ultimately shape who you are as person. In Wilmington, I have gone from Colonial Park to Mill Creek to a summer on my friend’s couch to my current house downtown. I’ve had good and bad experiences at all of these places, but I wouldn’t consider any of them my home. They have all only been shelter to me.

There are times when I long to go to my childhood house and feel that sense of familiarity I haven’t felt in three years. But, even though I’ve lost the only home I’ve ever known, I’m glad that my parents sold it. I will always cherish my childhood but it’s time for me to grow up. I will always be close with my best friend from high school but I don’t think my life will be empty without drinking in his basement.

After seeing most of my friends from back home, I decided to drive back Saturday afternoon rather than go bar-hopping in Annapolis because I had a lot of work to do. That’s something I would have never done that in past, but it was for the best. Though it can be agonizing to abondon the only house you've ever considered to be "home", maybe not being able to go back again can sometimes be a good thing.