We’ve been gone from our bedrooms for almost half a year. The comforts of expected home-cooked meals in fridges, private bathrooms with even more private toilets, a “world-class” mattress waiting for a mid-afternoon nap.
We’re halfway done with our freshman year. We’ve met hundreds of new faces and personalities that could potentially become life-long friends. We’ve adjusted to a new home while trying to adjust to a new climate, huddling under multiple layers of Patagonia jackets and Lulu Lemon gloves or stripping down to pastel, rolled-up shorts and logo-clustered tank-tops.
We’ve become individuals eagerly waiting for our residencies to become permanent.
However, as we start to become new residents we have to slowly lose our residencies elsewhere – back home.
While traveling hundreds of miles back to my home state of Arkansas over winter break, I noticed something different, something off and distant.
I was officially a tourist in a town I had spent 18 years of my life in. 6,408 days passed yet I didn't feel comfortable spending 24 hours surrounded by familiar sights filled with nostalgia. The city lake I spent morning hours running around being chased by vengeful geese. The steps to the glass doors of a high school filled with the greatest and saddest memories. The parking lot, covered in faded yellow lines, was an arena for shouts and fights, hugs and exchanges of kisses, reminiscing and heartbreak. We all have those certain places, those hidden spots representing treasure and childhood adolescence and bliss.
I've forgotten them, and they have forgotten me.
I have continued to live a life away from my house, my family, my friends, everything while separated by endless miles of Kansas wheat fields, shimmering Colorado mountain peaks, isolating and overheating Nevada deserts, and the everlasting sunlight throughout California. Yet, the same people I had seen every day are on divergent paths, continuing to trail-blaze their own individual freeways.
Am I selfish to want two lives?
One life completely broken off from the people back home, with no relationships to contemplate about, no strings attached. Leaving with five suitcases containing everything I need and desire. Of course, I would miss my family, but not enough to spend $500 to fly home every three months into awkward small talk and even more awkward questions about how I have no idea how to plan my future.
On the other hand, there's a life where I yearn to be the center of attention; the center of my friend group that I have built for years. To know that I have a support group that is concrete and that has stood against fights and battles. I crave that recognition from that homemade community; that I was the one who made it, the one who had finally made it out of the bubble.
Compromising the needs of these two life's encapsulate the journey of college for many. We eventually have to become foreigners visiting once-familiar neighborhoods, eating at comfort-food diners, and sleeping in once-welcoming beds. One question is needed to be asked, one question defines our collegiate journeys:
"Where is home for you?"
