Exits and Welcomes

Where do I belong?

I know we are just all chasing around looking for this place where we fit in and where we can be ourselves. Until a certain point it's where your parents are. That's were you belong, your place, your home. But the moment you move out, the moment you decide on your own and start to live a life apart from your family, you leave the place you know best behind to jump into a new life that is not even constructed yet. It's like swimming through cold water looking for an island, or sometimes it's just running through a huge building with hundreds of rooms where all the numbers look the same and the EXIT signs just pull you deeper into the labyrinth of corridors.

Oostende, Belgium

Sometimes that's what my life feels like. You are running from a person to another trying to figure out if they could be your friend, and you're chasing your thoughts trying to put them into the right order so that the missing puzzle pieces and cloudy questions signs can ease your mind, for just a moment.

It's is a confusing thing, living your own life. Saying "I go home" is ambigious and could refer to two places, and sometimes I belong to neither of them. My room at home, where I grew up, is still familiar and the same, but it feels empty and marble from time to time. My room in my other home, where I study, is warm and cozy, but it's like the protecting walls are missing, the outer support system. Which of these two places is mine?

When you stop belonging to your parents at a certain age, it's mostly your partner, boyfriend, who is the person you belong to. It's just where your place is, without any doubt. Or if you don't have a boyfriend, your really close friends are the ones who feel like family to you.

But what if nothing feels right anymore?

I've always wanted a place for me, a place where I belong. Now that I am trying to build a life outside of my home town, this issue becomes more and more important to me. Between books and lectures and homework I am trying to fit into a world which sometimes seems so different, loud and peculiar to me, that I found myself in a carousel that keeps circeling faster and faster until the lights around me blur into a huge streak of colours.

I'm trying to focus on something else instead, but it's hard. I know I will always be home where my family is, I will always have my place here which could never be taken in by anyone else, but the older I get the more I start thinking about my own life. My own place. 

Maybe it's out there somewhere. Eventually. 

And I am just here with open eyes looking for this WELCOME sign.