there's no place like home.

i'm not sure what that means but just as zach braff's character in "garden state" muddled through his own life wondering what "home" really was to him, i continue to do the same.

the time reads 2:45 a.m., and yet, my body thinks it's 11:45 p.m. i feel a certain peace here in michigan...a kind that comes when i'm alone and no sound but the living room mantle clock lingers to and through my ears. i love this peace and think that it probably won't be there forever. i've talked to friends recently about this idea of "home," and how the older you get the more it seems to be just a sad, imaginary place that you can never return to really. i don't want that to ever be the case, but i think it just might be inevitable.

of course like many people my age, i am not without my fare share of bad childhood memories. however, one good memory came to mind tonight and i couldn't make it go away (nor did i really want to, i think). the image of my siblings and i, double-buckled up in our big, brown, ugly, 1985 station wagon, headed off from greenville, south carolina to houston, texas. i sit in the back back seat (we called it "the caboose") and stretch my feet up high enough to rest them on the bottom of the back window. my sisters do the same, our toes greeting passing cars with chorus-line-sways back and forth with the help from our heels. there's a cassette tape of 'wee-sing-a-long' songs playing and of course b/c of that, we all are singing along, knowing every lyric and beat in between the catchy rhymes and age-old lullabies. our lives are uncomplicated, as our greatest fear seems to be "what we will do for fun now?" we are free to imagine, unlimited in our traveling adventures and on the road for hours and hours and hours. i look back and wonder how the time passed by so un-noticably by all of us. our smiles were mutual and seemed to strengthen one another as we'd put on shows for passing cars, or short SNL-like acts we would "get" but they would not. i remember pretending to be a mannequin-statue-like human, seeing if we could fool drivers into believing we weren't real human kids. like somebody picked us up at a local garage sale or something and decided to just throw us in the "caboose" and let us klunk and clink around for awhile with our facial and physical expression/motion held ever so solemn and still. i miss these days. i miss them b/c they are a part of my definition of "home." perhaps home isn't just a place but it's something more. all i know is, i'm missing it more and more every new day.