I’m moving out this week. Only for a little while, one semester, so it kind of slipped my notice. But the fact remains; I’ll be moving out soon.

I’ll call a different place my home. Letters that are addressed to me will now carry an English street name, one that I’m not used to yet.

I’ll miss my room with its wooden record player and the flower bedding and all my treasured books arranged in exactly the right order, the polaroids strung up above my desk and the setlists tacked to the wall.

I’ll miss the people who are a home of blood and bones to me.

I’ll miss the feeling of coming home, at least for the first few days, as long as my new flat doesn’t look like home to me yet.

A friend of mine recently asked an interesting question: What does home mean to you?

Is it a place or a person? And I thought about that for a long time and my first answer was this: Ideally, you are your home. Being home means feeling safe and content and at ease with the world. If that’s how you feel about yourself, then you’ll always feel at home, wherever you go and no matter who you’re with. So: Ideally, we are all snails, carrying our home on our own backs.

But then on the other hand, having a net to fall back on; safe arms or whispered words of comfort, a place that gives you strength, or a shoulder – that is a beautiful thing, too.

So, maybe home is not a question of either/or.

Maybe home is neither of these things; no place, no other person, not even myself. Maybe it is all of these entwined together; maybe ‘home’ is just a formula of our life so far, of our experiences and dreams and of the relationships we forged and fought, nothing that can be categorized or defined in one sentence.

That would be okay, too, I think.