For All The Homesick Dreamers Out There

The day I bought my plane ticket to Los Angeles was the day I thought I would never look back. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts where most people never left the east coast. When I did, I thought that it was the beginning of the rest of my life, and it was! I just never believed that after living in tree country for twenty years that I would miss it the second it was taken away.

I have been living in a polluted city for three years now and I can honestly say that I constantly search for home. It was not a mistake that I chose to live in The Valley instead of downtown or Santa Monica. I searched for that feeling of home and anything that could remind me of it. I searched for the highest mountains to see the brightest stars. I searched for the most residential neighborhoods that I could take walks down. As I passed the houses and the parents that played with their children, I saw home. We would smile to each other as neighbors do, but I was always then filled with sadness as I kept walking. I searched for the most wooded and natured areas I could find to spend my time in. I longed for my family, but I knew that my dreams were too big to go back home.

For all you dreamers, believers, and doers, home will always be there. Your dreams will not.

I miss my friends and sometimes I feel inadequate, as people’s lives continue without me and I am left behind. I feel saddened, as I am no longer invited to my best friends’ weddings because I won’t be around. I am overflowing with sorrow when I find out information about my friends and I am not the first person they go to anymore when life hits the dirt. I am constantly reminded that one cannot just leave a place and expect to come back to what that person has left. I left them behind, too. Every-time I visit home, it is always less familiar, shabbier, depressed, and my family is different. My dog is older, the paint on the walls has faded, and I notice wrinkles under my mother’s eyes that tell me that living is not forever.

I cry sometimes, because I am far away and no matter how many mountain tops I climb, residential areas I walk, or types of people I seek out that remind me of my friends, it is not home. But do not be discouraged, to those that are just like me, seeking out happiness instead of money and working a job that doesn’t feel like a job because that is more important than a house.

We are special, we sacrifice, and we work hard. We seek the brightest stars in the cities because somewhere inside us, we believe that it means something and that there is a path designated in those glowing diamonds. We dream big and move to cities because we know that opportunity will not always be around – and that believing is knowing that some stars are just too far to reach, but still accepting the challenge of reaching them.