When I was in the third grade, my parents tried to move houses. It hardly would have been a move at all; we would be living in the same town, really only a few streets over, in a relatively similar neighborhood. Yet, despite how anticlimactic this event truly would have been, prepubescent Nikki was so enormously horrified by the concept that she plotted the various ways in which she could have sabotaged every open house. In the end, young Nikki got her way, and the move never happened due to unforeseen complications (which, honestly, I had nothing to do with). As it turned out, moving would not have been the most convenient or productive decision for my family, and I have since lived in that same little house I was so protective of in the third grade.

Looking back, it seems so silly and innocent that I should have felt so emotionally attached to a small, creaky arrangement of wood and pillars. More than anything, I think I was driven by a fear of change. Our house had a small floor plan, occasional leaky faucets, broken doorbells, pipes that would freeze in the winter- but it also had beautiful decorations my mom spent hours arranging, little footprints from cats scampering across the floors, and rooms and halls and cabinets bursting with simple moments of happiness. It wasn’t so much the house, but the memories that the house contained, and I couldn’t fathom having the power to carry those memories with me. The tall wooden door at the head of our cobblestone path held these recollections in place, and if we left, it would all leak out like a broken hourglass.

I can’t help but think back to this debacle in light of my current realization that I now have a plethora of “homes.” With the semester winding down, I am preparing to pack up my little dorm and leave for the summer. While I’m incredibly excited to spend more time with my family and old friends, I’m also dreading the inevitable homesickness I know I will feel the moment I lock my dorm behind me. I know this place now. I know the atmosphere, the shops and cafes, the shortcuts into town center, my housemates, my secret alcoves across campus. I have a favorite chair in the library, a patch of woods I love running out to, and a genuine adoration for the charming buildings, landscapes, and people that surround me every day. I’m about to leave all of this alongside my college friends for four months, and there is a sense of loss bubbling behind my desire to rocket out of here as soon as my finals are completed.

I suppose it isn’t a wildly groundbreaking conclusion that home isn’t necessarily a physical place, or that it can be multifaceted. In fact, it’s awfully cliche. But I feel very scattered, like there are pieces of me embedded in other people and buildings and soils, and I have to be more self assured than I had been in the third grade. I have to be able to carry it all with me and reconcile these different homes I now have, without fearing that I will lose one the moment I pay attention to the other. Smith will be there for me again in the fall, just like the little house with the freezing pipes will be there for me in a week. I have conflicting feelings about this change in scenery, and I may be overly sentimental, but if home is where the heart is, then my heart stretches across many miles. To think I was once scared of moving.