Home.

I was born in a small house in a small town in the South. I opened my eyes, and I saw nothing, only darkness. I cried out for something that I had no words for, and it held me and comforted me. I felt safe. I knew where I belonged, and I felt like I could wrap my hands around it and call it my own. I felt like I could take it with me, or rather, it could take me with it. At this juncture in time, I became acquainted with a feeling that I would learn to call "home". They told me it was a place, but I knew better - I knew it was a feeling. I stopped crying and I went to sleep.

I grew older and went to school, and I found my home in books. Numbers frustrated me, grammar bored me, social studies bored me - I was always either frustrated or bored. Things either came intuitively, in which case I couldn't understand why we were studying it, or else I just couldn't wrap my head around what the teacher wrote on the chalk board. Other times, I just couldn't make myself care about it. I wanted nothing to do with anything - anything, that is, except my books.

School houses were small, one-room buildings back then, but I could still usually manage to hide in the back and just read. Sometimes, when I didn't feel like reading I would dip my pen in the ink well and draw pictures that I could see in my head. Eventually, I combined my two interests and began writing stories and illustrating them. I wrote, and I drew, and it contented me. I grew older, and I felt more and more at home with my hobby.

As I grew older and more mature, I came to understand the value of an education. Although I wasn't particularly interested, I began to pay attention in math, and I began to pay attention in social studies. I wasn't particularly interested in either, but I excelled in both. Still, I felt at home in my books and my drawings. After some thought, I came to understand what I had known all along: home isn't a place, but a feeling. I knew were my home was, and so that's where I decided I would live.