Finding home.

Today I walked into a pharmacy on my own and in Turkish said, "I don't speak Turkish, but I would like to try."  The 16 year old clerk smiled an okay, and I continued.  As rehearsed on the metro on my way home from work I asked, "Do you have paint turn off?" I believe it was more my emphatic pointing at my partially painted vamp red nails, than this delightful question that helped me leave with nail polish remover in my bag.  But it felt amazing to complete the communique nevertheless.  Absolutely amazing.

And I think it was somewhere between meeting a friend for dinner last night and making a 16 year old clerk laugh over nail polish remover this afternoon, that I found home.  Beyond looking for love in all the wrong places, these small gestures of existence, neither of which having anything to do with my apartment, made me finally and gratefully feel grounded here in Turkey.   

I'm still rather baffled by this circuitous route I've taken to rootedness.  I now suspect that the sentiment of home has almost nothing to do with the physical location in which I sleep, and sometimes eat.  It's not necessarily because my shoes are there or my family's photos happen to hang on its walls.  Or I can shower or not shower in a bathroom that holds my teenage mutant ninja turtle towel that I stole from the garbage of my aunt Marsha's house.  I have apparently misgauged the entire idea of home as having anything to do with ummmm...you know, a house.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not rubbing my fingers together to share with you the sound of the world's tiniest violin playing a sad sad song.  This is not a sentamentalist's realization.  It's not that I found a sense of home in this city, or in this country, or some larger more ideological form, which I then transmitted into a state of ease within my flat.  And its not that I found home because I figured out where my heart was--I leave those powerful truths for couch pillows to share.  It's more that I found out I that I didn't need to find my home because it wasn't lost.  The problem was more that I was my home; like a dog chasing her own tail, convinced it will be such a delicious prize.

At the risk of confusing and overusing too many animal based analogies I now wonder if part of what allows a spider to build its home wherever it is, is the way that it sort of shimmers in the light because it catches dew, or something.  I wonder if their webs muster some sort of mirroring effect because I think thats what happens when someone finds home, they can see themselves in it, as in its walls refract back certain truths about them, a certain identity.  

Im starting to think that my problem with my homes state of dysfunction and annoyingly delayed repairs was not about its lack of amenities as much as it read as my own present emotional dysfunction.  Nobody wants to come home and see their furniture and dishes come alive like the teapot from the Beauty and the Beast, especially when that teapot is not singing a song about being anyone's guest but rather screaming about all your ugly truths.  Although I imagine it would make for a good opera.

So it was, that last night and today I became functional in Istanbul.  And so it was, that my home miraculously became a functional space.