Two Homes

Well, this is one way to look at one of the damnedest questions in the world: "What is the meaning of life?"

I'm no traveler. No saint. No enlightened being. A believer, but in what exactly I wish I knew; not even in beings, per se, and definitely not in words. Ideas, yes. Numbers...close. I'm an engineer, it's hard to not love numbers in some way...they're an approximation of the closest things to truths humans can know. So do I believe in numbers? Hard to say. That's another story though.

I've not seen lots of the world; only know two languages, and one of them only partially (English and Spanish, and clearly, Spanish is the forte). I don't even have a passport. I'm a student. Student at USC. And when I'm not, I'm a student. In Oxnard. Always a student.

Attending school, moving away from home...man, what an experience. I am happy with who I am today because of going to school. I am vastly different from who I was before I left, hopefully in ways that have made me better--stronger, smarter, wiser, and dammit sexier! (Ok, maybe I'm being a bit modest about that last part.) Funny thing is, "school" and "home" are separated by no more than 60 miles. Yet my lives in either places, are separated by ideas vaster than that. In fact, "school" has become a "home" to me. My great experiences, my great growths--growths as great as learning to walk and becoming literate and conscious--the exact reasons I am who I am today and, no less, satisfied with those things that have made me the wiser...They are here. And I'm sorry, by "here" I mean "school." Although I write this from my "home" in Oxnard. Home...hmm.

So you see...you may not be able to figure out what is really home for me from that last paragraph. We've grown to understand the idea of home as that one location, usually with family and friends from days we don't even remember for lack of consciousness; that one place where we were born. Raised. Developed. Whatever. And if for lack of location, that one place where we find (or found, at one time) family and things that provide us with comfort unbounded, a comfort unexplainable. Home is as much idea as location.

After two years of school in Los Angeles, away from parents and closer to independence, "finding myself" (blah blah) and becoming who I am and forming a belief system/philosophy around my vast experiences there--I've had a crisis of Home. I am absolutely nobody worth noting without my experiences in LA. At the same time, I am not (almost-David) Edward Cruz Gonzales without my experiences in Oxnard/with my family. So where is home? I'd always taken comfort in knowing there was that one place that I could always find (a near) infinite (perception of) comfort. That place where I could be counted among the wise with respect to the outsider; I who call this one place home am truly wise about it in ways you are not--I am superior in this respect. Yes, that one place. But now there was another home. I have a home with the ghetto fabulous farmers. And now a home with The Angels.

My first thought then, especially after freshman year of college, was: Well, shit...I have no home, anymore. I have no one place to run and find comfort during times when I lack it.

For having two homes, I have the penalty of homelessness. At least, like I said, that's what I thought. And for a while, I had come to terms with that. I didn't really fret over it, but it was definitely a strange feeling, to know for the first time in my life, have no one Home.

I could potentially live, live till death and eternity with that idea. And I would be ok...alive and sane at least. But...I eventually became greatly unsettled by the idea of no Home. With the help of a friend I found another perspective--a perspective so simple it is, for lack of other words, fucking ridiculous. Perhaps by running with this idea I could find greater reward in life than settling for the one thing I know.

And maybe my idea of Home becomes much more than that...and my "crisis" evolves into not even a crisis of Home anymore, but an idea stemming from it.

Fucking ridiculous.