My parents have just decided to move back into our old house, the one where I lived for twelve years just after I was born. It's not really in livable condition anymore, and really wasn't when we left it, but it's been there this whole time. The acres are filled with briars and thorns and the gardens that were there are no more, and the whole place is rotted and caving in now. The electricity going into the building isn't wired right, and before we left, the house had caught fire from it twice.
It's really become more of a storage shed for us since my family are such pack rats, they never throw anything away, even the most trivial boxes and bottles. Everything has a use to them, even if it's never used.

But, it is the only place I've ever truly called home, and felt it. Sure, I almost felt like I had a home when I lived in an apartment with my sister, had my steady job and things were going good, but that was only for one day that it felt like it was home. I wrote a journal about that night.
I have mixed feelings about going back home, now. It's been hard to see what's become of my childhood grounds. The trees I used to climb, the woods I used to explore wide-eyed and adventurous, all of it in such chaos and overgrowth now, if it's still there at all. I hated going back there to store things because I hated what had become of the place. But now that there's a chance to redeem it...
I'm sure it will never be what it was, and that's going to frustrate me to no end, but if there is just a small chance to get back what once was there, some trinket of memory and nostalgia that won't leave me feeling empty, then I'd do anything.

So, it looks like in the future, I'll be making a lot of repairs and tearing down things that were held so dear to me in my memory. I even still remember our first phone number there, which hasn't been in use for the better part of two decades.

If I decide to go back at all. I'm sure I'll have to at some point to help my father (who is finally healing up well, thank goodness. Two more weeks and they'll take the cast off to prod around before deciding if it's time to start therapy again,) but I also have the opportunity to move in with an old friend of mine, who is renting a house right outside a college in our state capitol. It's a good school, and has a GED program, too. So I could finally start school for the first time if I went there.
For those who don't know me well, which is mostly everybody at this point, I've never stepped foot inside a classroom in my life. My parents did their best to home-school me from day one after having trouble with my sister in school, bless their hearts, but they could only keep it up until about the 7th or 8th grade level, and from then on I've been self-taught. Luckily, though, that was enough to keep me above the education of others my age, though I didn't know it until after I moved away and met my first friends when I was twelve. I'm thankful for never being put through what was our horrible school system at the time, but sometimes I wonder if I would have been less awkward around people had I gone. I would have definitely been less lonely growing up, but I eventually made my friends, and kept them, too.

I'm sorry for the long journal, but I just needed somewhere to put my thoughts before I went to work this morning, so that I could remember and reflect on them when I get home this afternoon.