44 pounds.

295 days ago I said goodbye to the only life that I had ever known the 16 years I spent on this planet. I spent a full month trying to pack all of the things that meant something to me in my current state into one suitcase, under 44 pounds, and on the morning of September 4th, 2013, I was going to haul it down my stairs, the stairs that I wouldn't walk for another 300+ days, load it up into my mom's Ford Focus, and we'd drive to New York City, the last time I'd see my mother for a year.

The night before, the third, I sat in my bed and watched the clock tick in midnight. I looked to my right and on my forest green carpet sat my life. The only thing I would have with me for the next 10 months of my roots, my family, my friends, and anything that built me into the person I was today. all in under 44 pounds.

I picked up my life, my 44 pounds, and left.

After 9 hours in a plane and an orientation camp, I landed in what I didn't know would become more to me than what I thought my 44 pounds ever could have. I scavenged through the families of people, desperately searching for the people that accepted me as their daughter for 10 months in the sea of people trying to find their newly selected children each with their rightful 44 pounds. Then, I saw them. The family I saw pictures of in emails. The people I have been imagining in my head for 2 months on end and all the adventures we would have. We shook hands and they took some of my 44 pounds from my shoulders, and we walked to the car.

My 44 pounds was loaded into the car, and I began to see the life that I had blindly jumped head first into ever since I decided to hit "send" on the application in February 2013.

My 44 pounds was unpacked, packed, half unpacked and demolished, packed up again, unpacked completely, packed completely, then completely unpacked again in a matter of a month and a half in this mysterious life I was struggling to get a grip of. I had been divorced by two families, one my choice, one not, and I was taken in by a family with an open heart and luckily a very giving eight year old girl that lets me sleep in her bed to this day. The nights I spent in all three families were filled of thoughts escaping through my head and running through all the possible paths I could go on in this exchange. I could be a daughter again. I could have another shot at the things I didn't have in my other family. I'm a younger sister. I have a sister. I live with two parents. I have a cat. I've experienced all of these things in a year of being independent. My 44 pounds were distributed throughout the families within my actions: they were distributed through the times I made pancakes for my siblings in 2 different families. They were distributed the nights I cried in my stuffy room in my first host family because I knew they didn't like me for the decision I had made to leave. They were distributed in the long conversations I had with my host sister in my second family about anything and everything. I had kept my 44 pounds physically, but in reality, I lost the life I came with and struggled to find the one I would return home with.

As I attended my school in that musty classroom across the courtyard, up the stairs, and all the way to the right, I started picking up new "pounds". The pounds that would start to build up the blinded mess that was going to become my life. I picked up the pounds of the unmasked kindness that is found within the Catanian people in every day situations. I picked up the pounds of curiosity of my class, them asking me everything from "how old are you?" to "what do you think of the concept of evolution?". I gathered the pounds of the respect that was had for others in the school atmosphere. Maybe not the respect of authority but the respect of the job that had to be done by the kids I was surrounded by. The pounds of determination came to me in October when I saw my classmates protesting for their education and more than ever, their future. These teenage punks didn't teach me, but helped me grow. They helped me discover the world.

The heavier pounds of self awareness came in to play when I was surrounded by foreigners at camps and hurled into family discussions with people who didn't necessarily like the United States.  I learned where exactly my country stands, where I stand in this big world, and before I ever had time to argue my side I quickly realized that there are so many people in this world and we are just like everyone else. Deep down underneath all of the politics we encounter daily and the constant flowing of wars and battles of countries and emotions and struggle and revolutions and power we are one. I come from the United States of America, and I will gladly say that I am well off. I have a school that supplies me with needs, I have a house with a mom that makes enough to give me and my brother a good life without an overabundance of the unnecessary, I have a car, I have electricity, I'm healthy. I'm sorry that not everyone in the world cannot say the same, because of not who they are but where they are. I'm sorry that the world isn't fair. But being sorry won't change anything no matter who says it or how many times it is said. I'm Kara Richards, American girl that speaks Italian pretty-much-but-not-even-close-to fluently, and I am a citizen of Earth.

Woah.

The heaviest pound I gained from this experience, was not a lesson nor what someone told to me. It was a discovery. It was the discovery of the true definition of a word that we all learn in the first year of studying a new language, one of the first words that came out of our mouths.

HOME.

Before I came here, I took away my 44 pounds from what I thought would be home. I sat in the back of my mom's car saying goodbye to what I knew as home. I said goodbye to Fergies, to the sole Burger King across the street from my house, Good's, the Turkey Hill I would always make slushie runs to after work, Sam's, the old train tracks, the big gigantic metal dinosaur people have in their front yard a few blocks down from my house, my school(s), and all the cornfields, and I thought to myself, "I'm not going to see my home for a year". 

After half of the year passed in Catania, I'd look around me and start to think "some day, I'm going to have to leave all this behind with no other choice". Unknowingly, the foreign city that was once so unusual, so different, had become what I knew as home. Just in a matter of days from now, I will have to take one last walk through the market and the Villa Bellini. I will have the ability to go out with friends at the drop of a hat one last time. Gelato will only be an acceptable meal option for so many more days. I'll never be able to walk to school again. A beer with friends goes back to being the unthinkable and illegal. The laundry and shower schedule gets more frequent and regular. Meals will go from pasta, fish, and fresh produce to canned and frozen foods with heavy, thick meats and the drinking glasses will return to the Disney ones we got when I was so little, filled to the top with iced tea and lemonade. My wallet will no longer be filled with colorful notes and gold and silver coins but green ones. The only horse and carriages I will see won't be painted and festive, but the Amish. The festivities of early February won't be a week long Catholic holiday but Groundhog Day. When I wake up in a few days, I won't have to stutter around with two languages because I apparently dreamed in another. My life changed right in front of me and I never saw it happen.

After 8 or 9 months abroad, the fact that I'd return to Quarryville became more and more real. As the swarm of my past life came into my mind, the attachments I had made to this life in Catania grew stronger. At this point, what is home? Was it where I grew up? Or did I discover it here? 

After days and weeks of thinking, the answer came to me in something I had said in the ear of a crying friend I had on my shoulder in March.

Home isn't a place; it isn't with certain people, it isn't an apartment, town, city, or country. Home isn't where people know you or love you. It isn't where people call you "love" or "tesoro". It isn't where you go when you are upset or when you are happy. Home isn't somewhere. 

Home is a sensation. Home is an emotion. Home is a feeling. Home is when you can walk into a room, and without it being said or done, feeling loved. Home is when you can cry in the open and there will be someone who comforts you while the others laugh about what you're crying over. Home is the comfort you feel with the people around you. Home is burping in public. Home is yelling at the people you love and holding pointless grudges. Home is seeing your friend across a courtyard, screaming their name, and running to hug them even though you saw them yesterday. Home is having worried parents in your ears about what you should do and when you should do it. Home can't be placed. You carry it with you wherever you go, wherever you were, and wherever you will be.

I'm leaving parts of home to go back to the other parts of home. That's the hard part of loving people, places, cultures, and lifestyles in two different countries. When you return, you will never get back to being completely "at home" again, because half of your homeliness was left behind, just waiting for you to go back and get it. Go back and live it. Go back and love it. 

At one point in your life, you have probably found yourself sitting on a musty couch in a dimly-lit room listening to one of your grandparents go on about a world war or segregation or the Kennedy assassination or the first man on the moon and exactly where they were, what they were doing, or how the world around them was. Maybe they talk about their wedding day or their first date or engagement or first child being born. But they probably ended with something along the lines of this:

Time goes by pretty quick, and if you don't stop to look around once and a while, you might miss something.

Yes, I did just attempt to quote Ferris Bueller. 

You're not gonna stay young forever (just ask my mother ((i'm gonna get shot for that one))) so make the best of what you have. YOLO is a good way of living life as long as you stop every once in a while and realize what you have. Realize what you have before it's gone because the unluckier people in life take things for granted and don't take advantage of them. Have an adventure waiting for you? Jump on it. Have someone you're in love with? Pull them aside and confess your love, whether or not they know it exists. Wanna do something? Do it. Have questions? Ask them. Have time? Spend it. Love others with the love you want to receive. Have someone drop you off in a foreign part of your city and try to find your way back home. Do stupid things because no one ever remembers the nights they got plenty of sleep. Cuddle with baby animals. Learn as many languages as you can, no matter how unnecessary they seem. Talk to the elderly. and the foreign. and kids. Stargaze. Talk about the things that confuse you the most in life. Discover something on your own. Don't let life hold you back from living it.

Gain your 44 pounds.