Home

This won't be a long one, nor a particularly relevant one, as I have had a few Guinness' tonight.

I have been thinking for the past few weeks about the concept of home and what it means to me.

When it comes to the concept of 'home', what comes to mind? To me, it's feeling like you belong in a place and you are comfortable waking up ten thousand kilometers from your family and the house you grew up in, and forgetting that you are somewhere else instead of in your bed back in the country you were born and the city you have spent all your life in.

Lately I have been forgetting that I am in fact in a room with 18 other people and in a strange bed where hundreds of others have slept before (unlike my mattress back home, where all I had to do to be sure of it's 'purity' was to turn it over before I started sleeping on it) and feeling as if I am in 'my own' bed and not being mindful of my surroundings.
Now that may sound very irresponsible and stupid but it's not in the way that I leave my wallet out on my bed or anything, it's more like I identify my little space as 'my space' and have decorated it as such and am as possessive of it as I would be my own room back home. Meanwhile my room back home doesn't have the same feeling of 'my space' as it normally would because someone else is inhabiting it. So without my secure refuge back in Sydney, I feel like the little space I have here is so precious.

I have always been one of those people who would never call a sleeping-place 'home' unless it was literally the place that I grew up in. This is a bit of a narrow-minded view though because think of all the people who have moved house extensively over their years...how can they pick one place to call home?
Home is where you make it, not necessarily 'where the heart is' as the saying goes-although I am open to that possibility as I am realising where closest friends I have are and where I have ties to...

Some of the others call the hostel 'home' or even places where they are staying one night...maybe home is just a place to rest your head and have some privacy. Maybe it's deeper than that and you need to have emotional ties to it and some sort of personal history behind it.

See, to me, Riverstone will always be my home. But on the odd occasion I might let it slip that I am going 'home' when I am really going back to the hostel. I suppose in a way the hostel is home to me (at least while I am living here) because my closest friends (here) are and where I am tied to at the moment...

But enough of that. I'm not good at being philosophical or profound. It was just something that has been on my mind lately.
I hate Dublin and would never want to live here for good-so that's probably why it's been on the top of my head lately...

Take care everyone and HAPPY BLOOMSDAY! (google it if you don't know what it is)