The furthest away from home I’ve been, is home. This might sound a little strange, but today I’m accepting the wordpress daily challenge in more of an abstract form rather than the literal.

In the spring of 2011, I found myself alone for the first time in a little over 12 years. Normally this is a period in my life I don’t like to talk about, but two wonderful things came out of this experience.

In April of that year, for the first time I signed a rent check to live in an apartment by myself; no boyfriends, no husbands, no roommates, just me. At first it was odd getting used to the silence. It wasn’t a deafening silence like you would think, there was something strangely comforting about it, a comfort in knowing I was away from the home I once knew. Still, the silence meant I was alone.

You see, I define home as in, something familiar, something of comfort and something full of love. This is the whole reason I had left the life I knew, none of these things existed in it. I was rebuilding my “home” by my own definition.

A few weeks later some work acquaintances knew I had just been through a major life upset. They were two of the few who knew I needed help, needed to vent and was in desperate need of friends.

When these work acquaintances reached out to me, little did we all know we would find a home in each others’ hearts. That night we became friends and over the course of that summer, we became “besties”. One of those friends was able to come to my hometown with me, away from the city that was our current residence. This would be another first for me, coming back “home” and sharing a place where I was loved with a new friend who would wind up becoming a part of that core group of friends from my child hood.

The home I had built for myself in the city was slowly deteriorating. When she and I were coming back from the sticks where I used to live as a child, she did something that not only solidified our friendship, but made me realize, there is hope, and always room in someone’s heart for a new friend…a new home.

We were on our way back to the big city and my stomach was in need of a sandwich. She being a vegetarian didn’t really want to stop at a fast food restaurant on the main highway here in Missouri. I didn’t really want fast food, but we were left with no choice. We compromised and stopped for a grilled cheese sandwich at Steak n’ Shake. She was hesitant at first to eat the sandwich but eventually she relented and started to eat out of desperation. She got half way through her half of the sandwich when she decided I should finish it. This is when I declared it was hers to finish, I had mine and she should eat it. I was worried about her getting hungry.

At this point, with her music blaring from the radio, my cat meowing profusely from her cage in the back seat, it was getting harder to concentrate. When I went to shift gears in my car, there was something suspiciously bread like near my fingers. She had placed her half of a half grilled cheese sandwich near the gear shift. Immediately I looked at her and she was sporting a Cheshire grin. We burst into laughter. Forcing her to take her sandwich again, I started to concentrate on getting us back home. A few minutes later I went to grab my soda to sip, instead I found again her half of a half grilled cheese sandwich beneath my fingers. We couldn’t quit laughing and this is when I realized, this is the furthest away from the home I knew, but it was going to be a great one; the home in my “bestie’s” heart.

When was the first time your “home” didn’t feel like home? Was it a release for you, a time to get back to being you or was it a time to figure out who you were? What did you find special about this time in your life?