Like a Rolling Stone

I ordered up No Direction Home on Netflix before I headed out East this weekend. My man and I both really dig Dylan, and I thought it would be fun to watch it together. As it turns out, we didn't get much of it watched -- not because it wasn't good -- but because we had other priorities in our limited time together.

We did watch the beginning though, where Bob talks about the fact that he never felt like his home, or his hometown, were really home. He said he always felt like he belonged somewhere else -- like home was somewhere to get to, not somewhere to return to. I so get that.

In the chorus of this amazing song, he asks a series of questions. They are aimed at a woman, likely a woman who broke his heart (or at least left a fissure in it):

How does it feel?

Aw, how does it feel?

To be on your own?

With no direction home?

Like a complete unknown?

Like a rolling stone?

But I can answer them, both from the perspective of a child whose home wasn't particularly comforting, and from the perspective of a divorced mother-of-two who decided to leave the home she'd created for herself and her birthed (rather than birth) family.

It feels like shit, a lot of the time. It feels astoundingly lonely. But on the other hand, it feels better to have no direction home than to have a home in name but not in feeling. And it feels better to be a complete unknown than known as someone other than you truly are.

And the thing about a rolling stone, as opposed to, say, a tombstone, is that it's on the move. Which gives it the opportunity to arrive in a very different space, a space that feels like home.

That's where I've found myself, for the first time in my life. I have no doubt that to find myself there required me wanting to be there -- but that was only half of it. The other half is being lucky enough to find someone capable of loving me so completely as to feel like I get to come home every time I hear his voice, or, when I'm really lucky like I am this weekend, every time I feel his touch...