Home. Most think of warm fuzzy feelings, a place of belonging, the place to go after a long stressful day.

Home. A place I’ve come to dread. A place devoid of oxygen. A place, in which, I am gasping for air through collapsing lungs. A town full of ghosts stuck in a loop of the same old things. Days are all the same, thoughts become recycled. Where everything is washed in a clouded grey. Where all that’s living is the mundane.

I don’t quite know when the change happened. It wasn’t always that way. Ignorance is bliss—a statement I never once understood, until I did. I wish more than anything that I could’ve turn back time to those simpler days.

As I attempted to separate myself and keep from becoming a ghost, I became wildly passionate about my career. I strongly believed that it might be my only way out of a place like that. The passion came easy, it consumed me like a burning fire. The flames big and bright added a new color among everyone else’s shades of grey that surrounded me.

But… as the alit flames engulfed me in the heat of passion, they also burned bridges around me. What little friends I did have quickly became strangers with grief-stricken faces, slowly fading into the crowds of ghosts that made up my “home”town.

With all my ties cut, I took my chance to escape. Left behind everything that had to do with the hellscape where I grew up. Escaped in search of a home like the movies depicted with warm fuzzy feelings and oxygen to feed my flames. In search of a true hometown rather than the scraps of a ghost town. And when I found it, Home, I drowned out the past like a clouded memory on a drunken night that probably never happened, or perhaps dismissed it simply as a figment of imagination.