Where is "Home"?

Your twenties mark a decade of exploration—the years to venture out, to paint the masterpiece that is your identity, to seek answers to the questions you've been asking yourself for your entire existence. This year, 2014, is the year I turned 20. It is the year that I promised myself to never stop the motion, to never escape the opportunities to escape, to never suppress my curiosity because this life is for living and rest is for the afterlife. I see several of my friends leading similar lifestyles: we behave in ways that make our parents' noses crinkle with confusion and that make financial advisors scoff while occupying their maplewood desks. Some choose to live as "ski-bums" in the Rockies, some drift through Southeast Asia, some move to L.A. to pursue fashion or business, some innovate the new screens of Silicon Valley, some clink wine glasses with politicians in Washington D.C. The common thread weaving through all of these stories—these snap shots of our youth—is a seemingly endless quest for home.

Where is this place we call "home?" Does it even really exist? Is it a place, a memory? Is it merely a cultural construction—a coping mechanism we've invented to overcome loneliness? We all know the English proverb "home is where you hang your hat." But what do we make of this? Does this imply that home is omniscient, forever surrounding you, wherever you are? In 2009, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros made the sweeping claim that "Home is wherever I'm with you," which quickly consumed the popular airwaves and made its way to our iPods, traveled through our headphones, shocked our ears, and buried itself into our hearts. But what if there is no "with you" in our story? Is "home" only experienced when shared?

By-and-large, my favorite articulation of the concept of home comes from Zach Braff's Garden State: "You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone… it's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist."

Our thoughts about home and adventure and where we should be in our lives are constantly and subconsciously influenced by media, by friends, by parents, by professors, by expectations, by fears, and by regrets. Here, I will share my experiences with the notion of home as well as stories that influence my place in and view of the world that we often call "home." But I do not want to confine these pages to one mind. I want to hear about your adventures, your risk-taking behavior, your cross-country move, your wrestles with the idea of "home." During our youth, we are largely homeless; we live between worlds—we have apartments but we have our parents' house, we have a couch to crash on but we have a place in another city, we have a tent strapped to our back and we have a hostel in the next 5 miles.

Where or what is "home" to you? Please send me any and all forms of submissions. Use whatever medium is comfortable—narratives, analysis, music, poetry, photography, art. Help me tell the story of coming home. Please contact me at ourvagabondlives@gmail.com to submit your work. 

In 1939, before I was even born, before I was even a thought or a prospect of a being, one iconic moment in film gave birth to the words "There's no place like home." I believe that to be true. There is no place like home. I just haven't found it yet.