Home is where...

the heart is?
your stuff is?
you hang your hat?

What if you're the kind of person who doesn't hang their hat, but just leaves it sitting on the shelf, or the table?

I went home for the weekend. Or, rather, "home home". As opposed to my home here, which would just be home. Except, no one was home at home. And since they're gone on an extended vacation, the house was extremely tidy, with no signs of life, and no food in the fridge. So, on top of not feeling like my home anymore (because it's not), it also felt more like a hotel than a home. Or, actually, a ghosttown.

It was so bizarre. The counters all cleaned off. My sister's room sitting bare (as it has for years). Mine completely bare full of foreign furniture and decorations. No familiar voices or background noises. It felt like a shell of the house, which was very unnerving. Add all the creeky noises from the furnace and the house settling that I had forgotten about, and the size difference between my little one-bedroom apartment and the big house, and I felt uncomfortable the whole time. It was very odd feeling brought home by a scene in Garden State, which I was watching Friday night.

"You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone."

(It always cracks me up to find life meanings in things like random movies and songs and tv shows, but hey, sometimes they say things so much better than I could. :p)

Driving around the city during the weekend, I completely forgot I had moved. Yet returning to this town, entering my apartment and locking the door behind me felt so good.

With my parents' house, the cottage and this apartment, I have keys to three dwellings and yet I can't figure out where my home is. Bizarre.