Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

How do you define home? Or when can you tell when a place has turned into a home?

I hardly stay in one place. The place where I was born is different from where I grew up. I studied elementary, high school and college in three different places. And now that I am working, I am staying in a different place again. I’ve lived for almost 12 years on my own now and I hardly feel homesick anymore. But then I thought… when I’m homesick, which home am I referring to?

• Naga City saw me as the traveling toddler. While my memories on this aspects of my life are very vague, Naga reminds of how I developed my love for traveling and mingling with people.
• Iriga City saw me take my first steps in discovering my dreams. I spent my formative years in Iriga City and it is the place I literally call my hometown.
• Pisay saw me break my backbone and re-establish it. It is where I realized that  there is a larger world beyond the one I already knew and there are lot of people of who are better than me. Despite all the hard experiences in Pisay, it is one of the most significant ‘homes’ because it is where I met the people I now call “friends for life”.
• UP.  If Pisay was a world outside of my world, UP is the universe outside of those two worlds. If  in Pisay I discovered there a lot of people who was better than me, in UP I discovered I was just another human being–unless I make a difference I can call my own. I hardly know anyone there now that I’ve already graduated but every time I step on UP ground there is a familiar feeling of “Yes. I’m back. UP, can you see me?”. There’s an unspoken sense of familiarity among people who don’t even know each other.
• Paranaque, Paranaque is a unique case. Can I call it  home already? I don’t think so. Right now, it just serves as place where I can sleep right after work. And while I feel that I am in a stage where I feel closest to myself, I still feel so lost and Paranaque doesn’t provide the kind of solace I feel in my so- called homes.

Which one is home?

So what’s in a home? I guess it’s the sense of familiarity and warmth that a place evokes in you. That sense can come from people such as family and friends whom you can always go back to. It could also  simply come from memories of  how a place had once been a significant part of your life.

P. S. I actually wrote this way back in June 2011 but somehow I never posted this. When I saw this week’s theme, I said to myself, “Ah, the time has come”. Sorry for the outburst of words and the lack of pictures but I feel I have expressed myself better by posting this.

Check out what home means to other people at Daily Post .