Going back home to Dallas the first time during college wasn’t what I expected it to be. I went home for a weekend about three or four weeks after school had started to attend a football game being played at AT&T Stadium, and I thought I could immediately slide back into the routine. I had missed being home so much, but I realized after being gone for a while everything now felt unfamiliar. I slept in the same bed, drove down the same streets, and passed out asleep on the same couch while watching TV as I had for eighteen years, but it was different this time. I was a visitor. I was living out of a suitcase. I tried to do everything that weekend – go to the game, go to the mall (College Station is great, but I miss Nordstrom), bake a cake, and go to my home church – but I fell apart because I couldn’t do it all. Even when I went back home for Christmas – a four-week break – I felt like a visitor because I knew I was going to leave again.
It’s a weird thing to go home now and to not unpack or get too settled. When college starts you move out and move into a dorm room where you only live for about a year, but it becomes where you hang your hat. The place you have lived the past eighteen years of your life becomes your “parent’s house” and your old bed feels like a stranger.
I think an unsaid thing among college students is that at this moment in our lives we’re temporary vagabonds. I don’t know where I belong anymore – I keep going back and forth between two places neither of which I can get too comfortable in. If "home" is defined as the place where most of my time is spent then my home is in College Station, but if "home" is defined as the place where I am from, then home is in Dallas. I know where I’m from, and I know where I’m going, but right now I don’t know where I land.
I imagine this to how it is when my mom gets to go home to see her mom and live out of her suitcase in her childhood room similar to how I am right now. She’s lived in Dallas for twenty-two years now, but we go back every summer to my grandma’s house. It never occurred to me prior to college that someday I would be visiting home instead of living there. I thought that coming to college wouldn’t change where home is, but it has. I want to stay, but I always have to pack up and leave again.
I’m jealous of the kids who decided to stay home for college and live with their parents for an extra four years. At the end of senior year it doesn’t sound optimal because everyone wants to leave and get on with their lives, but when your mom is on the other end of the phone and not in the other room when you need to cry about something or you need a laugh - it’s a rough experience.
With all that being said, whether I like it or not home at this point in life has taken on a new meaning – home base. I know that wherever I go and no matter how far I live from them, my parents will always leave the light on for me. Who knows what the future holds after college. Maybe I’ll live in Dallas or maybe I’ll move somewhere that’s a 3-hour plane ride away. Either way, I will always go back to my home base because no matter where I go, I know I'm never too far to come home.
