theCampusChronicle
UNION COUNTY VOCATIONAL-TECHNICAL SCHOOLS' STUDENT NEWSPAPER
Camilla El-Sabbagh, Union County Vocational-Technical School
Is it truly one place?
Because sometimes
Home is a beach
Or a park
Or my room,
When I’m all alone.
Does it have to be a place?
Because sometimes
Home is with my friends
Or my parents
Or sometimes my sisters
Or by myself in the dark.
What about what isn’t home?
Because sometimes
The safest places
That I love the most
Aren’t home anymore,
Because of the people that are in them,
And the words they say
Or don’t say
And how I feel
And how tired I am
And how lonely.
Maybe home is an emotion.
Maybe it reacts similarly to love,
Making you feel things you wouldn’t
Under normal circumstances,
A sort of blinder to your stress
Or useless anger or frustration
Or anxiety or fear
Or sadness.
Maybe that’s why I feel at home
When I’m reading
Or watching a movie
Or playing a video game I like,
Especially if the setting
Is someplace beautiful
Where I would want to live,
And especially if the characters
Are people I can relate to
Or people I would like to be friends with.
That’s probably why I love writing,
Because I create my ideal world
That maybe someone else
Would want to live in.
I dreaded the idea of high school
Over the course of that first summer,
Knowing that change was coming
And I would be really preparing myself
For the real world,
And the real world wasn’t
Anywhere near as nice
As the worlds I had read about in books
Or seen in movies
Or traversed in video games.
I remember once
When I was young
I have a nice memory
Of going to the beach
With my family,
And it felt like I wasn’t
A three-hour flight from home.
I looked back on that
Years later
And thought,
“That’s what home feels like.”
And it felt just like
The places in the books
And movies and video games
That I had always wanted to go to.
Home isn’t an emotion,
But it is a feeling.
The best feeling in the world.
And it’s as real as me.