Part 13. - Home.

"Maybe surrounded by a million people I still feel all alone,
I just wanna go home. Oh I miss you, you know" - Home, Michael Buble"

I'm a small town girl and at eighteen, I left home. I have no plans to ever return home on a permanent basis but sometimes I just need to be there for a while. I don't fit in, I never had but it's like being cut off from the world. No one really knows who I am anymore so I can stay holed up for a while. I can hide under my quilt, I can sleep on the sofa and at certain times of the day I'm sent to the kitchen where there is food on the table waiting for me. It's home. There is my bed with my bedding on, there is my seat around the kitchen table, there are pictures of me on the wall, nothing ever changes and everything is familiar. None of my stuff is here, but I can be here and sometimes I need to be here. Being home this week has in fact come as a blessing, it's been planned for a while and i've had my tickets for week but it's come at the right time. I needed to escape this week, I needed to hole myself up, not wear make up, spend all day in my pjs and watch films guaranteed to make me cry.

I feel so drained. I've had such a trying time since arriving back in the country after my week in NYC. I'm tired of putting on a brave face and a big smile. I'm tired of pretending.. so for the next few days, I don't have to pretend i'm okay. I can sleep for what feels like one hundred years and I can cry, and it's okay. Right now I feel like crying a lot, and after I do cry, I feel better. My family are good at cheering me up too, they're crazy. It's what I love most about them. I love that my dad gets drunk and talks rubbish, I love that my mum does silly accents in the supermarket and I love that my sister and I have so many in jokes that there is always some horrific memory from our childhood we can drag up and laugh at.

Coming home when you live elsewhere is like a safety blanket. You pretend you don't need it but it's always there incase you do. I pretend all the time I don't need to go home, and nowadays I go away for longer and longer periods of time. When everything familiar in my real life starts to fall apart, I retreat and return home. When I broke up with BFG, I came home and that's when I decided what I was going to do. I make plans, I talk to people and then I'm ready to go back into the real world with my head held high. I can neatly fold away that security blanket and I'm able to stand up on my own. Everyone gets scared sometimes, I do. I'm terrified of so much, but I've learnt since May I'm perfectly able to brave. I'm so much braver than I ever used to be, even if a lot of that bravery is in the form of perfected pretend smiles.

I don't think I'll be ready to go back come Thursday. Everything is such a mess right now and I can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I need a plan, I like plans. I like to be spontanious but if I let myself be spontanious right now it would be goodbye savings, hello Heathrow airport.. I used to be convinced that if I disappeared, no one would notice, well BFG wouldn't notice. When I left, I was fine.. but that old insecurity is creeping back again. A lot of old insecurities are creeping back again and I'm struggling to convince myself otherwise.

Why is everything always so complicated?