Home is whenever I'm with you

The word "home" has always invoked mixed feelings for me. Growing up, I was so envious of my schoolmates who knew exactly where "home" was - whether it was Springfield, Virginia or Albany, California, these kids had grown up their entire lives in the same house and gone to kindergarten through middle school with the same friends. I used to wish I had an uninterrupted childhood, one where Home meant one place.

But perhaps because of my very upbringing - one filled with transcontinental, then later, transpacific, flights every summer and winter, one coast for college and another for law school - I unintentionally became a vagabond. My soul is a restless wanderer, which not surprisingly, physically manifests in restless wandering. In the last ten years, I've lived in Berkeley, Seoul, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong and traveled to 30+ more countries. home, with a lower-case "h" is wherever I happen to live at the time. But Home, with a capital "H" has always meant the SF bay area to me - in the past, largely because that's where my grandma was, but now that she lives in LA, that's not the main reason. I think now, SF is Home because it's simply the city I love most. It's where my memories are - or rather, where the good ones are.

A friend recently sent me a youtube video of a father and daughter singing a cover of "Home" by Edward Sharpe. The chorus goes "Home is whenever I'm with you." It's so sweet, it makes me cry every time I see it - apparently the father taught his daughter the song because he separated from her mother and she was asking why she had to go back and forth between her mom and dad, and asked which house was her home. I think the lyrics ring so true to life though - at the end of the day, home is whenever you're with the people you love.