Home Is Where the Heart(break) Is

“You said, ‘love wrecks everything

And none of us survive,’

So I got over you last night,

And I am still alive.”

Those are lyrics from a Josh Groban song called, “My Heart Was Home Again.” It’s a song about loneliness, the feeling of watching taxis go by, seeing faces at a distance, empty window panes, and the memories of things that used to be. And then the song ends with the words,

“Then I saw your face across the street,

And my heart was home again.”

It wasn't until my adulthood that I realized that home is more than a building where you sleep at night. Sometimes home can be a person, or a state of mind. My heart came home once, and it’s been looking for a place to call home ever since.

After a while, your heart gets tired of wandering. It wants a safe place to land. Have you ever felt that way?

The older I get, the more I find myself wanting a companion, someone who’s close by, who shares in all my joys and sorrows, and stupid little things—someone who will get excited with me when I get excited over how far I rode my skateboard today, or that I buckled and finally bought that set of Tangled figurines from the Disney store. In recent years, I've found myself wanting someone to depend on. It’s not that I need someone to look out for me. I do a perfectly fine job of that myself. But, I want someone around to just…well…be there for me.

But how do you find that? How do you know who to trust, who will stay, who will be there for long term? And when you do think that you've found the right person, how can you place your trust, your heart, in their hands? My heart wants a safe place to call home, someone to call home. Yet, at the same time, running away and putting up walls seems like a much safer plan.

Who knows, maybe those walls I put up are just my heart’s way of trying to build a home for itself.