Home is all my contradictions.

I don't think there can be a precise definition of home. For an elderly person, the house could be a fortress, a safe place to stay in shelter, a guardian of time and memory, while for an adolescent it could represent a prison from which to escape. At thirty, I find myself in a "middle age" between these two possible ways of seeing one's home, which represents both things for me, and much more than that. In fact, I still live in the house where I was born and raised. You live in the same house for years and one day you realize it is an oppressive place you want to leave. But that same house, that same day, can show you the memories of a lifetime. He can show you, for example, the corner where as a child you played with paper boats, imagining them traveling to distant horizons. Now, those same little boats have gone away, maybe where I wanted to go and I've never been. Home is also this: a labyrinth of fluctuating feelings. Memories whipped by time and dreams that may have turned into disappointments. It is a sweet shelter but also a prison where you can feel yourself dying little by little. And while I'm here, looking at home, in a continuous odi et amo, each wall tells me a story and each shadow looks like a chain. All this should frighten me, but it is a bitter sweetness, a melancholy return. And I remain here, with a tender and stern look towards my home, grateful for all that he has given me, for the shelter that perhaps he can no longer give me or that I do not want.