This is what I saw after a very long night on the bus from Montana to Portland, Oregon. It should have been a train ride, but the train was frozen someplace out east. I suppose the bus was not as bad as I imagined it would be. Besides, the road rides the Columbia closer than the train tracks at some points, and that makes it well near worth it.
It was beautiful to look out and realize it was getting to be light outside and to know that I was almost home. The ten or more hours I had already endured worked to create a sleepy peace. It was then that I realized how relative a term 'home' had become for me. I had left home, to go home...and I found no contradiction. Home with all of the family and friends and people that I knew and loved. Home with all of the accepted idiosyncrasies that have been built into me, that I take elsewhere and that often show that I am from somewhere else. Home.
There are layers and layers to that word. The longer I live and the more I move about, the more homes I acquire. It does not matter if all of the memories are pleasant. Home is where you speak the language, where you respond naturally to those microscopic aspects of culture. There was a time when Montana was home and I lived there. It was good to go back. When I am there, it is home. Yet, I am going to school in Oregon and it is becoming home. I am learning new quirks and meeting new friends and, indeed, new family. In a few years, I will move from here and make a new home.
I wonder how many homes I will have in my lifetime. That is a terrifying thought to me because all of my homes occupy a piece of me; and they will never know each other. I am being parceled out, and I cannot protect all that I love. Therefore, I cannot protect myself. The act of leaving may be wrapped in a romantic mystery, but there is something about coming that makes you vulnerable. You have to prepare for both, I think or it is harder to adjust, to fall in love with the place you go to for its own sake. It is more dangerous that way, because you can be hurt more; but in my drowsy state, as I looked out the window and thought of the hundreds of miles I had traveled in a single night, I decided that it is better. Anytime, you get the opportunity to love something that may or may not love you back, do it. If all that stands in your way is fear, do not let that stop you.
