Welcome Home

Home to me was a foreign concept

I would always hear someone say home is where you feel comfort

Safe, and you can always come home

That wasn’t my home, that wasn’t my story

Home was a realm of maddening chaos and insanity

The same routines, the same fights, and the same cycle of abuse

One thing I swore to myself when I turned 18 was that I would never return to the home I left

I told myself I would cut ties with my family and pave my own way

I didn’t know what a real home could feel like, what a real home could be

I sometimes even ran away from home

After wandering around the city all day, I eventually had to return home

I hated my home deeply

I hated the people in it even more

Home was hell to a young troubled version of me

It was the dark place my mind would often find itself in- that same hell

So, when I left to the army, I decided had no place to go back to

No place to call home

I never found a home in the army either

It was just as cold and unforgiving as the home of my childhood

Only with more drinking and more fighting

This is one of the reasons I found a love of traveling

A desire to explore and adventure

There was nothing holding me back

The world could be my home and I could go anywhere

Because my home was a place where I only had to take care of myself and my chaos

Wherever I went, the chaos followed me

No matter how far I ran, the chaos always caught up to me

I didn’t know it at the time, but I've learned this

Home is what you carry with you

I carried nothing but pain and chaos

I didn’t carry the good

I didn’t carry the times of happiness and joy that I did have back then

I only carried what left the deepest scars in my heart

There was no room for anything else but this black hole of pain

I can see that now

I can vividly see the path I walked and what I brought me with along the way

That path is covered in black ooze

It seeped out of every orifice in my body wherever I went

It was a rotten, and festering ooze that poisoned everything it touched

When I had reached the end of my path, all I saw was death and rot

When I decided to get sober, I dropped a torch on that path

That torch held my higher power’s love, and it purified that ooze so it couldn’t follow me anymore

I had found my home at the end of that path

The fire lit the way home

There it stood, patiently waiting

Lights on, and the front door unlocked

All I had to do was walk inside

I hesitated

Holding the doorknob in my hands

Slowly turning, but fearful of what I might find inside

There was a special warmth inside

A peace I have never known before

It wrapped me in its loving arms

And whispered

Welcome Home