Today’s Five Minute Friday is hosted by the luminous Crystal Stine. The idea of Five Minute Friday is to write based on a prompt for five minutes straight – unedited, unleashed, unfettered.
And so without further ado, I give you today’s prompt: Belong
START
Belong. The little girl inside me reaches for that word, wants to taste it and feel it and wrap it around like a hug.
There’s never been a sense of belonging. I’ve always been cursed to be the nomad, settling in a place for a time, but never sinking down roots, a potted plant that’s moved from place to place. If I were to travel the stars and galaxies or plumb the depths of the oceans or travel every country, I doubt I’d ever find a place where I truly, fully belong.
My heart’s a nomad’s heart, a wanderer and a wayfarer, a searcher and a yearner who is lost but seems never to be found.
There have been people along the way that almost felt like home. There have been instances where my heart rests for a moment and I think that this could be it, perhaps, but I have no roots to sink into the ground, even if it was my desire.
It’s as if my roots have been seared off.
Yet the flip side to this is that everywhere I wander, I carry a piece of “home” with me and am able to blend in everywhere. Though I might not fully belong to a people or a place, nor even myself, I can still adapt to wherever I find myself and blend in, pretending to belong, a perpetual outsider moving through. In each new place, I throw myself into my new surroundings with abandon, dancing the dance, forming quick relationships, but always under my bed is a packed suitcase.
Just in case.
STOP
ink sea 
Sarah, Thanks for sharing on Five Minute Friday. We are all sojourners on our way to eternity. Blessing with the son wrangling, one of my favorite sports. 🙂
Beautiful writing!
I used to have a rule that everything I owned needed to fit in my car. I am happy to have settled in, but am so happy I have all those wonderful memories of the times when I could just get up and go, so I got up and went!
I love the metaphor of the potted plant. Sometimes they are the most beautiful of all – as long as they are cared for and replanted when they need to be! My life was the opposite of yours – I never moved until I moved out for college and my mom still lives in the same house I grew up in. That has its own set of issues that develop in a person! Thanks for sharing!