Everyone has a place they go to when the world becomes too much for them; or at least most do.

Mine is dark, like the sea, and full of stars.

It isn’t quiet.

It’s an endless orchestral, swirling with symphonies, conducted within the faintest whispers that are always just out of reach.

But sometimes it’s a field swirled within a blindingly blue sky wherein I count my breaths by two’s.  Until upon soft imaginations blows a different sort of song.  Carried on a breeze of dust bits and tiny particles of sunshine … it’s great and beautiful …. And it’s one that doesn’t elude me, but consumes me.

But every so often the song changes yet again…. and this time it is no imagined place of black celestial oceans or golden labyrinths of sunshine, where others are but comforting phantoms.  I am with them…. and it is more breathtaking than the stars and more blinding than the sun. It is Home.

It was like this that my journey began.  Far flung yet always homeward bound.  The summer I left home for good.

Every path was marked with disillusionment yet every moment new and original to me.  I discovered that the world was set apart and filled with its own sort of symphony completely removed from any of mine. It granted me physical, tangible, ephemeral things to grasp onto to.  Things that would ultimately add to my character.  Things I would graft to my bones in order to make my own.

My journey taught me that nothing really separated me from the person I had been or from the people that I left behind, aside from the hours that separated us.  Direction in life cannot be dreamed up…  It has to be earned.  It’s what you’re allowed after you have fallen down and managed to pick yourself back up time and again.  I was still the same woman that lost herself in empty sunny fields and dark oceans of stars.  That wasn’t going to change.  But the place I called home would.

The one thing that stopped my total self-absorption during my far flung, homeward bound journey was nothing fateful or even original.  It wasn’t the sound of empty oceans or shapeless symphonies.  It was thoughts of home….the one that held my roots and the one I longed to be grafted into.  It was the company of souls I had known for my entire life.  It was the sound of guitars strumming ‘round crackling fireplaces.   Of  pianos playing songs so familiar that they place an ache right in the very core of you.  And you ache because all those things are a part of you in a way that nothing else has ever been…. despite all efforts to the contrary.

It’s a beautiful ache.  One that you embrace.  One that you get when you’ve finally come home after a long time spent lost and away.