When you find you call a hotel "home"and don't even notice, some would say something is strangely amiss. It's even worse when you're talking about leaving "home" to go "home" before you go back -- "home". People tend to latch on to things that they feel will make them stronger or ground them longer, but the truth is, everything changes, even home. When I'm where I sometimes call home, I find that it isn't even the place I thought I was grounded to. The memories of it somehow seem unreal, maybe like they were just hopes and ideals laid to rest when I drove away the very last time.
If home is where the people me love are, well, they changes too. Time might be a great healer, but time is also a great divide. Over time I find that some of those people aren't the same people I knew, or maybe I realize they never were. Or, maybe they're gone. Death, as I'm learning this week, is a startling realization that "home" could change in an instant.
The dark snake, Death, stings in the blink of an eye, between two words in a sentence or even in the spans of two breaths. Who would know the impact of that sting were they not stung themselves? In the moment of death, what did my grandmother see? What "home" did she consider? What did she hear when the pin dropped and the End brought its dark shadow to her door? The snake knows. He is not concerned with the ripples of impact. He does not care what "home" he rips apart or brings together. Whatever befalls those affected by him are none of his concern, only more reaped by his fangs.
In the end, it's never the place or the people that "home" derives its definition from, it is the memories. When I leave home, do I tuck the memories in the back of my mind to consider whenever I'm homesick? This is the only way that "home" is always with me, otherwise, "home", is just another word.
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