What if home isn't just a four walled structure? What if home isn't where you keep your toothbrush or where your family brushes their teeth at night? Maybe it isn't where you store your shoes, or hang your clothes.
What if home is where the refrigerator that holds your favorite juice is.
What if home is where you are happiest. Where you wake up each and every morning feeling complete. Not because you are incomplete without this place that makes you happy, but because this place rushes feelings of happiness through your body much more heavily than anywhere else in the world can.
The place I call home brings me solace. The place I call home isn't a four walled structure, nor is it where my family brushes their teeth. The place I call home is Europe. Before this summer, I would have named solely Paris as my home, but come to think of it, Europe is my home. Paris is just where I leave my favorite juice to come back to.
I am currently sitting on the balcony of the place I used to call home since I was eight weeks old. This balcony is in Hawaii. I was made here, raised here, and my father first visited this island in nineteen eighty-four. Ever since then, this is where he kept his favorite juice. I can see why, there is something so simple about this island. I think it is the common reassurance that everyone who lives here chose it for the same reasons. The sunsets, the weather, and or the quiet nights only interrupted by the waves rolling over the sandy shore carpeted with lava. My father calls this home, and I can see why.
But Europe, Paris; there is something so special about this place. Something almost impossible to conform into words. It is a place that everyone should visit. Not because I think they will suddenly take their juice from Switzerland or Texas, or from anywhere else they are holding it, and suddenly move it there- but because Paris has something from every single place in the world. It is a collage crafted by the hands of every visitor who comes and goes and it is because of this, that it's beauty is incessantly multiplying.
I keep my juice here.
*2017-2025, I keep my juice elsewhere now.