I was ready for it to be over. I packed up the car on a Saturday in January and went back to my dorm, leaving my parents' house for what would probably be the last time, at least the last time I stayed there for more than a night or two.

I hadn't come home for the summer, instead choosing to find an apartment to sublet that kept me closer to my job, the friends that were also sticking around, and most importantly, the freedom that came with not living under my parents' roof. Shelling out rent for a month-long sublet didn't seem practical, so I returned home for the following winter break. And even with all of the love my parents have shown me, it was hard. I had spent a year on my own timetable and making my own lifestyle choices. It wasn't fun to plan my whole day around obtaining transportation and to constantly say no to friends who asked to hang out.

This is not to say that I'm not incredibly grateful for all that my parents have done for me, both over the years and over this winter break. I'm an only child, so we've always been close, and I know it's been harder for them to let go than it has for me. I will always attest that nothing was ever personal or coming from a place of ungratefulness. The fact was that it was hard to be twenty, working nights, and wanting to be social while living with my parents.

All of that being said, I would never trade any of it for the time I got to spend with them in my childhood house before moving out.

The space itself holds most of the memories I have. We moved from the city when I was young, renovated quickly, and got started with our lives in Baltimore County’s Greenspring Valley. Of the laughter I remember sharing with friends as I grew up, the vast majority of it was here. There’s not a room I enter that does not also hold a specific memory of something that once happened there. And the house will always be a place of comfort for me, but at the same time, I have moved on, and it doesn’t feel as much like home as it used to.

I always say that home becomes an increasingly fluid concept as you move from high school into college. You slowly start to adjust to living away from home, beginning to catch yourself saying “I’m exhausted, I just want to go home and sleep,” at the end of a long day and in reference to your dorm bed. You feel the need to correct yourself when speaking, differentiating between your room and “home-home,” the repetition somehow driving home this idea that this home was your original resting place at the end of a long day before you moved away to this foreign place that becomes part of your every day.

For me, “home-home” is only twenty minutes away from my dorm at school. I’m lucky to see my parents on pretty much a weekly basis, regardless of whether or not I make the drive away from school to do so. In fact, I don’t go back to the house I was raised in very often. I’m fortunate to be able to run back there if I realize I forgot something vitally important, but for the most part, I'm on my own. I see them, and I value their opinions more than anything, but as mentioned, I live my life mostly in a mostly independent manner. It's not parallel, it's perpendicular.

Even given my growing independence, it’s still hard to reconcile the fact that I will likely never consider this house my final resting place again. More bittersweet are my parents’ increasingly more frequent conversations about selling the house and moving down into the city as well. I am still attached to this place. I remember the bottom level flooding and living without a kitchen for months while I was ten. I remember figuring out where the creaks in the floor were so I could sneak across my room and play games on my first boxy desktop computer when I was supposed to be asleep.

I remember watching HGTV for hours on Sunday mornings before football, screaming at the TV not because of the game, but because they’d picked the wrong house on House Hunters. Having gone to a borderline absurd number of house showings ourselves before deciding on the one we chose to move into, it clearly struck a chord. Even beyond that, a channel I had once bemoaned as being "boring" had become something I actually looked forward to because it was always accompanied by time spent with my mother laughing because some couple didn't understand that paint was a thing you could buy.

A lack of immediate commercialized "civilization" in any direction and my mother's hatred for board games taken into account, we watched a lot of TV at my house, and a lot of really bad movies. Although occasionally my dad would strike gold (or rarer still, we'd all agree on something to watch), he turned on a lot of trope-y, low budget, and generally pretty terrible movies.

I had the remote one day, and somehow stumbled added A Haunting to the list of shows we'd turn on when nothing else struck our fancy. With dramatic reenactments to boot, it was instant entertainment. It was essentially a repeated horror movie trope: families just like our own were plagued with ghosts, demons, and other entities that would not leave their house, no matter what the families on the show tried. It was always described as an otherworldly entity having a postmortem attachment to a particular place. And as ridiculous as this show was, I thought about that idea a lot when thinking about leaving my parents' place for the last time.

Home does hold more than just the material. You shop for the perfect place to watch your life progress. Even the stupid little things that are wrong with it become inside jokes, like the chocolate brown bathroom fixtures and curry-seeped wallpaper in the house we moved into when I was six. And those memories live on, even after the people have left the space. I am still gripped by an overwhelming nostalgia when I pass by my old house in the city, even though I was so young when we left and even though it’s changed hands twice since then. I have a strong sense of personal geography and believe that places become a part of us.

It’s why even though every part of me was ready to leave my parents’ house on that Saturday in January, I still felt my roots pull gently out of the ground as I walked away. I was ready to leave the physical place, but still holding onto the personal space, the memories that still remained there, and the place I realized I would never be the same again for me.