Leah McCann Smith | Writer & Editor

by Brian Smith

Is home the town I grew up in, or the physical house within that town? If my dad sells said house, am I suddenly homeless? Or is home just the space you come back to at the end of a long work day? I lived in the same house for 18 years plus summers and a couple more years post college. Something not a lot of people can say. That house in a Chicago suburb has been my rock now for 27 years. It has been my escape from big cities and college towns and in a way is my reset button. Every time I’m home, even for a night, I feel recharged.

It’s a four bed, two bath house with a big yard and long driveway. Growing up, I was jealous of my friends with pools, and big basements with theatre seating and the nice basketball hoops with the glass backboards. I would envy their giant kitchens with islands and upstairs corridors that overlooked that main level, definitely not something most 8^th grade boys notice. I would come home to our little kitchen with hardly enough room for four people to fit at a table, my basement with a regular old couch and I would crave more. Now don’t get me wrong, I by no means grew up impoverished, these remarks are the true definition of first world problems. But as I grew up and began to really understand how good I had had it, there was nothing I would change about that house.

I’ve had other “homes” since then. Dorm rooms, apartments, the empty room in a single mother’s apartment in Santa Monica and the empty room of a music producer in Brooklyn. But nothing ever came to close to that house in Glen Ellyn. Until I met her.

I lived in a four-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with three roommates. No oven, no privacy, ceilings that my head hit if I stood up straight. It was no home. It was hardly a crashing pad. It was the place I came home after a long day of work, 14-hour-long, walked straight to my room and shut the door behind me. I could hear everything my roommates did. If I wanted something from the kitchen I would wait until the other person was done.

If you’re wondering what home is, start by figuring out first what home is not. To me, home is not cleaning up after strangers and going out of your way to stay out of the way. Home is not sacrificing your own comfort so someone else can take a hot shower (until you have kids at least), or watching Netflix so quietly you can barely hear the dialogue so you don’t wake anyone up (until you have kids at least).

But when she was there, in that little bedroom with a mattress on the floor, it felt like home. When she walked with me, that dirty neighborhood felt more comfortable. We could stay up late, sleep in and sneak out without a peep from the roommates. It was the first time since moving out of that house in Chicago where I felt home.

And what do you do when you feel home? You move out as fast as you possibly can. You find a place together where you don’t have to tiptoe around and can comfortably make breakfast and sit in the living room without anyone else to worry about. So that’s what we did. In the movies, asking someone to move in is a huge deal. Making a second key is a grand gesture that can make or break a relationship. For us, at least in my opinion, it was just a natural decision. In fact, I hardly remember how it came up. It was a no-brainer.

Now home was our spacious (Brooklyn space and normal space are two very different things) one-bedroom apartment. It was filled with our cups, our plates, our pans and furniture we picked out and we (I) put together. Home was again an escape. It was the place where we would go no further than the donut shop downstairs and back up to hide from the world. All while feeling like we were missing nothing. In a city where there is so much pressure to try the new this and experience the pop-up that, we had a home where none of that mattered. But even still, with the perfect apartment, the environment did matter.

New York City is the greatest city in the world for a lot of people. It’s also hell on earth for a lot of other people. We could no longer ignore the fact that we hated our surroundings. Surroundings which are well-documented, so no need to explain.

 So, home. What is it? Home is comfort and familiarity. It’s a feeling that can’t be contained by drywall or exposed brick. It’s where you live, sure, but more importantly who you live with why you live there. Home, now, for me, is where she is.

There will be other houses and other towns. Ones where you’ll learn which creaky steps to skip so you don’t wake the whole house and ones where you’ll be able navigate the whole thing in complete darkness. There will be new towns where you know the shortcuts and where to slow down because the cop that always sits there. But you can never replace the feeling of wanting to experience and learn those things with someone.

Home truly is where the heart is. And my heart is with her.