I was eight or nine years old the first time I ran away from home. I stuffed a spare jumper into my backpack and threw in my favourite teddy. I’m not sure if I’d planned to forage for sustenance or had included some snacks to tide me through.
I remember it was, for a moment, peaceful.
At that age, the world was small and heading around the block and down the lane felt as though I was traversing half a continent. It wasn’t that anyone came looking, I’d likely just gotten cold and tired and returned home silent and dry of tears.
What is true is that from about the same age, I started longing for a home.
It wasn’t bricks and mortar I pined for; it was the intangibility of the feeling that envelopes you in a particular location. It was the imagined feeling of roots sprouting from my limbs and finding their way through the very ground I stood upon that I wanted. A thing I had never experienced and didn’t even know if it was real, but was superstitious for
I was looking for peace, a place I felt I belonged.
I thought I’d found it once in the Victorian apartment I shared with no one but my thoughts. The one where I taped the edges of the beautiful but drafty sash windows, trying to stay warm as the Southerly blew in off the English Channel in the middle of winter and on into spring.
What made this place worthy of sprouting roots was it was spacious. And by that I mean spacious of mind. I was no longer at the whim of others. After cycling through a strong headwind on my way home when I opened and subsequently shut the door behind me, I was alone with myself for the first time in forever.
I had chosen this aloneness.
I filled it with guilty pleasures and home-cooked meals for one.
I made friends that were my own. The wholesome friendships they talk about in classic novels. People who called me to share a cider on a Wednesday evening, just because.
I almost held it in my arms, It was almost real.
But I itched to keep going, I itched with the feeling I didn’t belong here. I itched with the notion that perhaps this wasn’t really what home felt like.
I itched with love for a boy who couldn’t or wouldn’t make this place home.
So I said goodbye to the place that had the potential to canopy me with a feeling of home and started my search again. Not alone this time, but with his hand in mine.
We crossed from continent to continent. We followed the sky, we followed the sea.
He was so at home in his body.
He was so at home in himself.
It was him I wanted to bottle up and swallow in the hope I would feel it that same way too. Here he was, being so easily all the things I had longed for since I packed the backpack and headed down the lane at eight years old.
The more we moved, the more horizons we witnessed the more adrift I felt. From myself and the world. I wanted to throw my favourite teddy bear into my backpack and head down the lane. But I didn’t tell him this.
Here he was solid and at home in the fluidity of the ocean. Here I was simultaneously drifting away in a current I couldn’t control.
What could I say to the boy who knew of nothing but home in the world?
We eventually married that boy and me. He vowed to help me find a place I could embody what he embodies.
We, after 10 years of seeking arrived in the mountains. Me after 38 years of living found a home. After 38 years of living rootless, with the help of the boy, and hands of my own, I started to build a home stone by stone.
It turned out to be the mountains I was looking for. It was the mountains that would envelop me. Mirror to me solidity and stability I craved. It was the mountains that made a home for me tangible. I was adrift in the ocean because I was made of the earth's mantle, not the salty water.
It was here in the foothills of the mountains my roots began to grow between the rocks in the soil, curling around and holding on.
It was here.
It was here.
It was here.
Love this piece! Like you, I searched and searched for where I belonged. It is often a theme that shows up in my writing. Everything is temporary is my motto now but for a long time I believed in permanence.
So happy to have found your Substack!
I think I’ve always had this feeling of searching for that feeling of home. I want to put down roots to feel secure but I like to feel footloose and free too. The mountains sound beautiful x