It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home.

The desire for a home consumes me, raging through my veins like an angry fire. My soul is sick with want of a place where I can say "this is my home and this is my family." What is life without a home and family? These are the two necessities of a happy life. A wandering vagrant may be content in his own ways, but everyone needs a place to come back too, a place where you are safe and loved. A place built on love is truly a happy home.

A great restlessness stirs within me and I long to return to places of my childhood, to return to places where I laughed and cried and loved. I feel contained within an inescapable box. My dreams are filled with a home with children, a backyard with a secret garden, and an attic that I can call my own, where I will do my writing.

This, I wish for more than anything else. The grief of losing the ability to say this is my home is suffocating in its severity. Once you reach a certain age, you can no longer call the house in which you reside in your home until you've created your own family. Living in an apartment with my mother is a nice and wonderful opportunity, but I feel that home has escaped me and is just out of reach. It's pulling at my heartstrings, teasing me and whispering my inner most desire to me.

Lacking my own home, the stifling feeling of dependence looms over me. To be free! What a wonder that will be, to be free again. I've had a taste of it before and now I'm remembering and desiring it. The only place that I have ever felt at home was in a forest. This forest has been the only constant in my life since birth. It has been there through my 21 years and will continue on long after I am gone. I wish to be surrounded by woodland trees and the lush undergrowth of ferns. To hear songbirds singing their love songs, to hear the crickets joining in with a chirp, and the bullfrogs too, singing their guttural tunes among the lilies and cattails.

I am tired to my very soul, homesick for the feeling of being home. I long to be wrapped in my love's arms with a blazing fire before us, Lola asleep on the floor all curled up with her bone. To look out the frost-covered windows at the snow covered pines and cherish the warmth inside while the world outside is iced over and hibernating until spring. This eternal summer that I am locked in is not all sunshine and happiness. Vast amounts of rain fall and the hurricane winds wreck havoc and destruction.

My heart aches for change. To regain connection to a certain place that I can call home. The old saying, "Home is where the heart is," is very true. I want to take my heart and bury it deep inside a place and watch it grow and bloom with the tenderness of love.