It seems like we can proudly say that we have made it through our first full month of college, and we’ve experienced a roller coaster of emotions. We’ve made it through recruitment week, enjoyed syllabus week, were slammed by what an actual week felt like, partied up during our first long weekend at college on labor day, had sorority initiation, attended sorority formals, and even suffered through the first round (and maybe second and third) of tests, exams, and presentations.
Needless to say, school has been keeping us on our toes and effortlessly throwing things to do at us before we are given a moment to stay seated for more than five minutes. They’ve kept the ground beneath us running without giving us a moment to catch our breath. We go to class all day and we come back and study all night, only interrupted by the slew of meetings, activities, events, and social events. It’s a good tactic, I give them that, for TCU to jam pack our schedules so tight that we don’t have time to even realize that we’re tired, missing real food, and, most of all, missing home.
Yet when the going gets tough, when everything culminates together and you’re stressed to the T and you find yourself sitting in Communications class about to cry because You. Just. Want. A. Break. And you just want home, when you are weary, sleepy-eyed, and overwhelmed, you finally come to the realization that your comfort does not lie in your dorm room, but lies in wherever you call home.
You feel that your heart is heavy; heavy because we are tired and we’ve forgotten that we aren’t meant to handle this all on our own. We need others to support us, to be our home. In this new place we find ourselves in, we are left with a gap inside that we need to fill, a piece of our identity that we left behind when we packed up our lives, left our homes, and ventured to come to this new world. We search inside of ourselves and inside of others to fill this void with something that feels like home and with someone who we can, in some way, find a piece of home in.
So I have Claire to be my light and Alex to bring me cookies and scratch my back when I’m stressed. Shelby to cry with me when neither of us can keep it in any longer, and Makenzie to give me courage. Brooke to guide me. Natalie to give me hugs. Marlee to pray for me. And I have my sister, my sweet sister, whose heart has my biggest piece of home in it, who stands as my refuge when I seek it and my friend when I’m without.
And when I sit with each of these people, these pieces of home, we look back at each other, silently asking whether they will be our home. Silently reaching to fill ourselves up with the reminiscent feeling of what could be like home, searching in their eyes, and hoping that they will say yes when you ask them, “Can I call you home?”.
So we wander corner to corner looking for a friend, asking if we can call them our home while we are all a little bit without one. You are two hearts mutually lacking the truest sense of belonging, a belonging we threw aside to come and join each other, so the least we could do is say yes, because we are all just looking for someone to call home.