You don’t truly appreciate your bed until it’s gone. Once your bed, that place you return to at the end of a tough day, that place where you know how to fluff your pillows just right, and that place where life becomes comfortable once again, is ripped away from you and replaced with a twin extra long—that’s the moment when you realize that your bed is a sacred ground descended from the very heavens above.

For the first five weeks of college, I tricked myself into thinking I didn’t miss my queen size back in Elmore, Vermont. I told my cramped up legs that I really did have enough room, that a normal person can sleep in a straight mummified position; just as I told my stiff spine that, no, beds should be this hard—anything softer would be otherwise impossible. I let myself believe that this was an acceptable sleeping experience for any human being.

Now, as I sit here in the confines of my own room, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convince myself again that my Champlain bed is as comfortable as the one I’ve lived in for most of my life.

When you go home for the first time in five weeks, it’s honestly not as strange as you might think it would be. Throughout the drive from Champlain College back to my hometown of Elmore, Vermont, my mother kept asking me, “Is this weird?” or “I bet this feels like another world to you now, right?” She thought it would be an out of body experience for me, or a strange sense of déjà vu, as if I was stepping back into a recurring dream I haven’t had in months. To be honest, I thought it would be like that too.

Elmore is vastly different than Burlington, Vermont, the city that surrounds Champlain. In Burlington, you can’t go five minutes without hearing some kind of wailing alarm, without seeing at least ten cars go by, or walk down the street without seeing at least fifty or more people. In Elmore, two cars going down the road is considered traffic and the only time you would ever see ten cars would be if they were all waiting for a herd of cows to cross the road (which happens every day at 4:00 pm). My hometown only has roughly 800 residents; one general store that sells milk, bread and beer for the whole town; and has the last running one-room schoolhouse in Vermont.

My town is about as podunk as podunk can get.

Though when I transitioned from the city to the country, it didn’t feel out of place—I fell right back into the rural life. I accepted the stillness that surrounded me almost instantly. I traded the shouting voices on the streets for rusting leaves, the blaring music from the dorms next to mine for the soft din of my mother making dinner, and the thirty people in my hall for two people I have known since the day I was born.

My life reverted back to what it was five weeks before I went to college. My mother made my brother and I sandwiches just before we all piled in our Subaru (the unofficial state car of Vermont) and drove on dirt roads to do what you do when you live in a small town: get lost in a corn maze. For hours my mother, brother and I just caught up as we shoved on our rainboots and hats and tried to escape the vast quantities of corn surrounding us.

(Have you ever realized that corn stalks are insanely tall? There was no way we could cheat and look over those things—they towered over me at least twice my size. We had to give up looking for the exit after two hours and just try and find our way back to the entrance.)

Once we had escaped, we all went apple picking in the rain, running around in a competition to find the perfect apple for the pie we were all going to make once we had returned to the warmth of our home in the woods. It all seemed so ideal, like a scene out of a novel: the three of us getting lost in a maze, picking apples, eating homemade spaghetti and apple pie, and all watching a crappy movie curled up together on our couch. I really didn’t think I would want to leave the comfort of the home I had known for most of my life.

But then I started to see my phone go off. My college friends were all using our group chat, asking each other when they wanted to go get food together, or just sending each other the most ridiculous messages. As I started to get more and more I miss you messages from my friends, and updates about what was happening on campus, I realized I wanted to be at Champlain just as much as I wanted to be in Elmore.

I’ve never had experiences like the ones I’ve had at Champlain College in my life before, even considering I have only been there for five weeks. Never before have I ridden a bus, or gotten brunch at a diner with a friend, or watched people LARP every single Sunday, or thrown spaghetti at a window to see if it would stick, or traveled without a map and gotten lost for hours, or spent every night with people just chatting and playing pool, or marathoned shitty horror movies, or gotten up at the crack of dawn to read on my porch, or reviewed aggressively mediocre Chinese food on Yelp, or given out weekly puns to people in my hall, or garnered an addiction to cafeteria chocolate milk, or even eaten ramen.

My life for the past five weeks has been filled with firsts. Never before have I had a friend walk into my room, throw themselves on my bed, and talk to me about life; I’ve never had a friendship where someone would just so willingly open up to me in such a way, and let me open up right back. I’ve never had a friend I could go take a shower with at the same time (obviously in separate showers) and sing with slightly off key to the music playing off of her phone. I’ve never had a friend before that eats breakfast with me every Monday and Thursday, gets brunch with me on special days, and then goes out of her way to go on quirky adventures with me and talk about Harry Potter in a very serious manner. Never before have I met someone who had the same appreciation for puns, shitty movies, and ironic fashion choices as I do.

Champlain has given me all of these things, all of these vastly new experiences, and while I was away, I missed it viciously. As I sat on my tan couch at home, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander to the common room of my dorm, to the green couches there; I couldn’t help but wonder what they were all doing, what they were all smiling about tonight. I wanted to be there smiling with them just as much as I wanted to be on my couch in Elmore catching up with my mom.

I really thought I would love one place over the other—that I would find Elmore more of a home than Champlain. I thought that was the right thing to do; to pick a singular location on this earth to call your home. That’s the way it should be, shouldn’t it? To find your one spot, your domain. That’s what you’ve been told; you only have one home.

But that’s just it: I no longer feel like I have one home—I have two homes, and that’s okay. As a college student, you’re now a creature with two places, two rooms, and two beds (yes, you should still consider that crappy twin extra-long a bed). You now have two support groups: your family, and your friends back at school. You have these two places that bring you vast amounts of joy in their own unique ways.

I appreciate Elmore and Burlington in different ways. I love how in Elmore you will see thirty wild turkeys within eight hours, and how our one store always has the same fall decoration: a sad, defeated scarecrow with a purple, lopsided smile. I love that the cars always have a permanent one-inch layer of mud on their back ends, and how the cows outnumber the people. I love the simplicity of it all. In the same mindset, I love the excitement of Burlington. I love being able to walk out of my room in the morning and know that I could walk five minutes to get to a bookstore or the college supply haven that is CVS. I love being able to know that in just thirty seconds, I can walk down a flight of stairs and see my friends. Just as much as I love the silence of Elmore, I love the noise of Burlington. Heck, I didn’t even mind riding a bus for the first time.

I thought I should desire to be at one more than the other, but I realized it’s okay to consider two places to be your home. You can love more than one place—humans have the capacity to store multitudes of emotions in the concaves of our hearts. We’re complex creatures with complex emotions, we’re naturally inclined to find beauty in more than one factor of our existence. Life itself certainly has the ability to be beautiful in more than one location. Everything is multifaceted.

You can be a citizen of two worlds; you can have more than one home. You naturally have a foot in both worlds—home and school—as a college student, and you shouldn’t have to choose loving one over the other. You can embrace both.

I know now, even though I’m still fresh to college, that both home and school are an interwoven joy in the very sinews of my body. They both exist in my heart, not in a war, but a harmony. They both bring me joy, and they both make me smile for their own unique reasons. I love both of my homes. Hell, I even love both of my beds (yes, even you, twin extra long). Home isn’t where your bed is, it’s where you can return to at the end of the day and know it feels right to be there. It feels right to be in Elmore, and it feels right to be at Champlain.

When you visit home for the first time in a long time, just remember, anywhere can be your home, you just have to be open to it.