There is an old and tired saying that proclaims, “Home is where the heart is.” It usually festoons the walls of kitschier households as if to prove something opposing its own triviality. This saying has bothered me far longer than many of the more heinous platitudes that pollute this world, purely for the fact that I have been living in contestation of this banality for quite some time now.

This summer, my family finally managed to sell the house we had been living in for nearly 12 years. I had grown up in this house. It had watched friends, family, boyfriends, pets, and every other relationship you can think of come and go in its walls as my sister and I grew up. It also happened to have accumulated quite a lot of stuff. The beginning of my summer was spent throwing out and packing nearly 12 years worth of things into either garbage bags or boxes. As someone who claims to have no heart, I have found that I actually harbor quite an annoying amount of sentimentality, so this process was bittersweet to me. And it was while I was packing away old notebooks and all four giant containers of books (all of which weighed in at roughly fifty pounds or more), I was faced with a sobering reality.

I was unofficially homeless.

While some may argue that while, yes, I was leaving my childhood home, my family was moving into a small condo while we were between houses. That’s a home, isn’t it? And while that may be true, during this packing process, I was already living out of a suitcase. I had returned from my first year of college, unmotivated and reluctant to unpack in lieu of the upcoming summer term.

This meant that I had previously packed up a year’s worth of my things from my first dorm room, moved it all back to my home, packed that all up again, moved it into a condo, packed up again and moved into an apartment for a month, packed again, moved back home, and must pack again to be ready to move into a new apartment for the upcoming fall semester. Don’t even get me started on the fact that, come spring, I have to pack up all over again and move overseas. The thought alone makes me want to vomit.

Still, my impending nomadism left me feeling cold...and, quite frankly, homeless.

Which brings us back to the ever-interminable debate: is home really where the heart is?

The heart can mean a lot of things. Whether it’s friends, family, or a pet, home should be wherever those things are. But as I look around this bland room at our new “home,” with the walls lined with boxes of things my mother is reluctant to unpack and has decided to store in my room (“You don’t live here, anyway”), to the sad twin bed that has replaced the behemoth of a futon couch my preteen self thought I wanted, I find there is a bad taste in my mouth. There is nothing on my walls (besides the stain of a beetle I just brutally killed with my flip-flop ten minutes ago), and coupled with a horrible fruit fly problem we have inherited from the unit below us, I have come to accept the fact that this shall never be home.

So I’m here to put the debate to rest. To quote one of my favorite bands, Real Friends, if home is where the heart is, I have never been home.