Home

What do you consider your Home? To some, a home is simply the same as a house, the area in which you dwell and live and return to at the end of the day. To others, a “home” may not necessarily be a physical location, it could be a smell or a sense or feeling in your heart when your surrounded by the right people. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as simply, “one’s place of residence.” To me, Home can’t be defined simply by a few words. It’s a feeling, a quite powerful one to be honest. When I feel at Home, there is this overwhelming joy that rushes through my veins, suddenly appearing, almost out of nowhere. There’s not really an exact cause or reason for the pure happiness I coalesce but its a state of mind that can only be defined through the simplicity of these four letters: h,o,m, and e.

I feel this “Home” emotion when I revisit the beautiful city I was born in of Vienna, across the world from my current home in the United States. I feel this emotion the second I ring the doorbell of my cousin’s house in Canada on Christmas Eve. I felt this emotion throughout my entire travel through the country where my family comes from, Bulgaria. It’s amazing how walking into the house my family has owned for three generations can feel more like Home than most places I go to on a regular basis… stepping into that house imprinted a permanent feeling onto my heart. It was a mixture of experience and discovery, yet a slight sense of familiarity. Thoughts of family and pride and love and togetherness reinforced the happiness in my soul and screamed out this feeling of Home, which to me, proved that it cannot just be a word attached to concrete places as Merriam-Webster suggests.

Everybody on this planet has a different opinion of everything, it cannot be denied that definitions are amongst these differences in perspectives. Some people don’t give value to words, and may not have thought twice about the fact Home could remotely be considered an emotion. Others may agree with this abstract realization that potentially describes what a home is… However, what I can say with absolute confidence, with the knowledge that there are people in the world who are going to agree with this and who have already agreed with this is, “Home is where the heart is.” To me, that statement contains the ultimate truth about the word, and provides some crude evidence that Homes don’t have to be physical.