Home(?) Again

It always strikes me that I really do not understand what it means to be at home. When you go home, I imagine there to be a sense of relief, "comfort" not in purely the convenient sense, but in a deeper current, a sanctuary even. To me, the ring of "home" has no current meaning and I placed it in the extremities of time (Eden and New Jerusalem). In fact, "home" seems oddly constructed and even unnatural, though I know it is not the case.

I return "home" to a new house, with a woman and two kids I have never spent more than an hour with prior my arrival. I have no place of my own, no history embedded in these walls or floors, no memories of these people, and more importantly, no memories of this new family formed through its rough collisions. We are currently softening the residue of these collisions, but I think it will be incomplete even after the children had left. There is just too much history that cannot be forgotten; there is no Pandora's safe and history has a way of catching up to the present. Hopefully the force of time and human kinship will knit strands of familial connectiveness.

In this new home, I sleep in the living room (the common room?) next to the wall; downstairs, as my new brothers and old brother sleep above, with my father and my new "mother" (purely in the legal sense). This is not a complaint. Once again, this is not a complaint. But certainly, this is not home.

They are good people. She is too nice to her children, my dad too old to begin the long process of discipline. The children are happy, at least the youngest one is. The middles ones need to recognize the other as human, but they have four years to work on that.

In the meantime, I also graduated two weeks ago. I do not think it will "hit" me until the next time I see my peers, which is as always, "soon." At this point, I do not actually "miss" anyone, I think. It is simply a fact of life that people move away; we are largely passive creatures in that way, making our way through life alone, though people flit in and out. It proves that humans make weak anchors; there is only one foundation that is reliable, only one person. But then again, I think maybe this is only a condition that I placed on myself; perhaps for people who are good at keeping in touch with others, it is not like that. I don't know, but it certainly gives me pause to think about the weight I place on relationships. During our DR trip, the guys and I said that we would all actively try to pursue relationships, platonic and romantic. Peter already had us beat. *Cue Beyonce's, "All My Single Ladies."

On to lighter matters, I am trying to plan a roadtrip to San Diego and to Seattle from LA. Anyone wanna come? :)

in Jesus Christ,

Jae Han