Home

“Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, 
but not our hearts.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Homesick in Heaven

I've been gone for a week on a lovely vacation with friends.  It was good to get away, but it was also good to come home. So good…to be home.  

My home has been my refuge...a place to let down my mask of normalcy, to hide in the quiet, to be separated from everything.  Each day I have come home from work, put on my pajamas and spent the rest of the evening in my room.  I have even been eating my meals in my room.  I never go to the family room to watch television with my boys.  I never sit out on my beautiful deck.  I haven't even opened my pool for the season.  On days that I don't have work or other responsibilities, I don't even get out of my pajamas.

While my home is my haven, it has also become my prison.  I'm not quite sure how to break free...or if I even want to.   I'm pretty sure this isn't normal, but it has become normal for me. I find the world outside my front door too loud...too bright...too alive.  I feel blinded by other people's jouve de vivre, their undamaged happiness, and their nice, neat forward-moving lives. I keep forgetting that their world didn't necessarily halt because mine did. 

And so, at home, I stay…where it is dark, and quiet, and other people's contented lives don't intrude on my loneliness.

27

Cyna