There's No Place Like Home?

Facebook keeps asking me where my "HomeTown" is.

I realised some time ago that I don't have an answer to that question. I'm not even sure what it means.

What is my HomeTown? The town I was born in? The one where my parents live? The place I feel most at home?
That would be 3 different places for me!

For a long time I've felt that there really is no place like home for me.

I've felt very uprooted ever since I moved house for the first time aged 11 and left the town I had always considered to be my home, Weymouth, Dorset on the South coast of England.

I remained faithful in my love for the town, but it didn't remain faithful to me.
When I returned aged 18, it just didn't feel like home anymore. We'd both changed so much. I knew I could never live there again.
It just wasn't my home town anymore.

Surely your hometown is a place you can call home, a place you feel at home and where you feel welcomed when you arrive?
Weymouth didn't do that for me any more. I felt like I was grieving for my own life!

I've wandered and drifted a lot in my life, looking for meaning, for love and I've never been able to put roots down anywhere. In the past 22 years, I've moved house 19 times. Yes 19 times!
No wonder I'm fed up with it!

The pain and up-rootedness I felt as a child upon being forced to leave my "HomeTown" has stayed with me and in some ways I feel it prevented me from ever feeling I had a home.

The nearest I have to a HomeTown now is where I currently live & the town I seem to be drawn back to over and over.

I live in Bournemouth, on the South coast of England. Not so far from my first HomeTown of Weymouth, but a much more accessible, grown up town with proper shops, jobs and opportunity.

Bournemouth has become my adopted Home-Town. (Is that allowed?) My closest friends, my chosen family live there.

Everything is familiar, known, and each time I've moved away, I've found myself drawn back again and again.

Bournemouth always looks after me. There's always somewhere I can live, there's always been work for me here and the town and beach are so beautiful in the summer sun.

I guess that would make it my HomeTown.

I may not be originally from Bournemouth, I wasn't born here, I certainly didn't go to school here, but when all's said and done, it's My Home.

So maybe your HomeTown is the one that you choose after all.