Where Is Home? A Collection of Very Very Short Stories
It’s that time of year again when we challenge YourLifeIsATrip.com writers to tell us a story in 25 words or less. But don’t let the small size fool you — at the heart of each of these very very short essays is a powerful story.
The subject this time is home. What it means. What it doesn’t mean. Where you feel it. Where you don’t feel it. Is it a person? A Place? A Memory? It can be funny, sad, crazy, serious, philosophical, poetic—it’s up to the storyteller.
What about you? Where, or what, is home to you? Use the comment box below to share or join the conversation on our Facebook page. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
1. Home has ghosts of towering elms that once met over the street. Victorian village gone to seed. Burial ground of my ancestors and son.
2. Taking my beloved solitude at home on the road: Singing off key at the top of my lungs, stopping whenever I need to pee. Freedom.
3. For the migrant soul
Home is wherever you've been
Wherever you go.
Memories like rooms
Along with places unknown
Will welcome you in.
4. We check into a hotel. We “nest.” Toiletry bags hang in bathroom, essentials next to bed. And by doing this, each hotel becomes home.
5. Home is where I go each night in sleep. The rest is somewhere, but it ain’t home. Dream on.
6. Home: it’s what eats you up inside and nourishes you outside, the place you can never return to and you never left.
7. Home is where the heart is—
they say.
Perhaps, ’tis the place
to which the heart,
shattered, scattered abroad,
Returns.
Gloria Squires
8. Door opens, wilderness to the back, Yellowstone out front, wild merging with hearth warmth, home embedded in the greater community of all living things.
9. I travel the world, but the place I’ve chosen to pull weeds, hang my art, invite guests, share daily life with my partner, is home.
10. Having wandered the earth, I face home understanding how Odysseus felt. The domicile of my memories exists as a decayed shell of its former self.
11. Home/Hell
Home is the place I left as soon as I could, going back as few times as possible. Home is another word for hell.
12. Never one house, nor one city.
Leaving is starting; the unknown beckons.
“Where is home?”
She taps her chest. “Here. I am home".
13. Home is connection. Laughing with another. Dancing wildly. Loving and living well. Napping in a hammock. A heart swollen with gratitude and peace. Here. Anywhere.
14. Home, you are with me like a river. You’re a trickle; you’re a flood. You’re the snowflakes that melt the instant they reach my hands.
15. For many, home is a destination to which we aspire. We determine its attributes along the way. Arriving there may not be possible, or necessary.
16. When it’s time to move, the house needs to know it is no longer your home. Take yourself out so the buyer can fit in.
17. Perhaps ‘home’ isn’t a place but a feeling—a sublime sensation of being calm, alive and connected. Of being fully present in one's skin.