Home

Home. You'd think four letters would be easy to define. There are definitions in the OED and plenty of other dictionaries, but it's not just "The place where a person or animal dwells," as the first definition in the OED suggests.
For me, home is where I feel safe and provided for. Of course, that applies to the place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and where I go during breaks from school. For the first two years of college, that also applied to whatever dorm I was living in, with the exception of two incidents in freshman year and one incident as a sophomore. To quote Pumbaa from The Lion King, I thought that "home is where your rump rests." That had always applied to me.
Last year was stressful, and not only because of classes. There were issues with friends, and my roommate's negative attitude started to affect my own: negativity is not something that's conducive to feeling at home.
So, for me, "home" is more than just where you go to sleep at night. My roommate this year still says that she's "going home" when she visits her parents every other weekend (they live very close), and I still say "I'm going home to work" when I have shifts at my ghost tour job. Do either of these instances count less as "home" than Room 129? Furthermore, when does Room 129 become more "home" than the houses our parents live in?
WILL it ever count as more "home"?

As I look to the future and when I will eventually have to move out of my parents' house and find a place of my own to stay, when will that place start feeling like home more than my parents' house? When I pay my own bills for eighteen years? When it's a place where I feel totally safe, and alone-but-not-lonely? When it's a place I've built up a life in?

There are some people who are turtles, and carry home on their backs. Maybe it's just easiest if I become one of those people.