2025/Natalia-

A house is limited to a building like an apartment or a flat. A home can be anywhere, as it refers more to the place and the feeling, rather than the structure. For instance, you could live in the most ramshackle like home, yet it would still be a home. However, you cannot call yourself living under a tree as living in a house. The similar words have different meanings. I’ve had many homes and lived in many houses.

My house now is a cluttered apartment with the sights to the apartment complex below. Despite the curtains almost never being opened in the other places of my house, I like to open mine. As I look down on trees which I normally look up to, I feel like a stranger to nature. Seeing freshly bloomed flowers face to face gives much more of a thrill than barely seeing them from so high up. The apartments that surround mine block much of the sky, making me blind to the beauty above. All I see when I stare straight ahead is tan colored paint with windows and curtains. Yet, when I take the elevator down, I see the detail and wonder of nature. Home is where I find beauty in it. In my house, I see only beauty in what lies in my room or in my family. To me, none of the houses that I have lived in were able to execute the true beauty of the outside world. However, traveling to different places with sights of greenery and wildlife make me much happier, in a way, to say nature is what I feel as a place called home. I feel sad when I can no longer see the stars, only the brightly lit lights of human invention.

To be a human means to be the smartest species with the capability of understanding the world as we evolve further and further, yet I feel as if each time we understand more, we understand less. We look ahead at all sorts of ideas, but we never look behind to see what we have destroyed. Everyone’s home is the earth, but soon we may not have a place to call home. Only a house.