Boxed up

“Where is home for you?”

I moved back home a few months back. I fit my entire life into a dozen or so boxes. Virtually every item I own — clothes, plates, extension cords, old band posters, socks, casserole dishes, rugs, lamps, shoes I don’t even wear that much — it was all (somewhat) easily condensed and squished and packed away and fit into a moderately sized vehicle. To paraphrase Eliot, after moving a handful of times, I’ve measured out my life with cardboard boxes. But is that any way to measure a life? The items you acquire as you go from place to place? What kind of dining set defines me as a person? What tangible household items are necessary for achieving the intangible concept of “home?” Where is home? Anywhere. Allwhere. There’s nowhere and everywhere like home. I’ve called many places home. D.C. , but not actually D.C., a string of suburbs outside of which you’ve never heard, all which felt as much like home as the next, whether or not I was there long enough for everybody to know my name. But someday, I want to be a city-dweller — a real one, not a half-truth spitting suburbanite. My heart is in a sprawling jungle of concrete with space do things and be things, all within the safety and the comfort of relative anonymity by virtue of being outnumbered 8,000,000 to 1. I can be no one and everyone and home, away from home.