Some families take vacations to tropical islands or take cruises around the Mediterranean. Growing up in my family, we took road trips. We would pack up our red minivan with more luggage than any family of three would ever need for a short trip away and drive to Canada to visit my cousins.
I used to love the thrill of a trip. I would sit on the foot of my parents’ bed and watch as my mom packed clothes into her floral luggage and would shake with excitement in the way that only little kids could.
For as small as my immediate family is, my extended family is huge. There was never a shortage of people to visit, couches to sleep on, or cousins to play with. Coming from a house with no siblings, being with so many kids my age was so thrilling, that it wasn’t until the picnics ended and I was lying on a foreign couch in a foreign living room, that I felt a twinge of sadness for my bed at home.
Nothing compared to that feeling of coming back to Pennsylvania. I would breathe a sigh of relief, feeling the familiarity, driving through my town late at night after driving all day. I used to love looking at the dark outline of the houses that lined the streets I knew by memory, and knowing that I had finally come home.
In a lot of ways, leaving for college felt a lot like traveling to Canada, same level of excitement, except much more terrifying and without my mom to pack my clothes. The summer leading up to leaving for school was one of lasts, late nights, and a feeling of intent in the finality of it all. For most of the summer, college was only an idea, until it was August and it was no longer a distant idea, but a harsh and immediate reality. Leaving, I’ve realized, is nearly impossible until you actually do it and have no choice but to just go.
The first few weeks of college are those of an incomprehensible amount of change, introductions and excitement, so much so that you barely realize you’ve transitioned to college until it’s done. The whirlwind of being at school is so intoxicating that it wasn’t until the spell of new beginnings broke, that I felt that same twinge of sadness, longing for the comfort of my own bed.
When I came home for the first time in fall, it was when I truly began to understand what it meant to go away to school. I felt the wave of familiarity driving back into the town that I grew up in. I smiled at the sense of relief I felt, that amidst the whirlwind everything had stayed exactly how I had left it. My memories of high school were so recent that I could still feel them among the places that used to consume my life. I felt comfort in the thought that home could withstand the test of time and remain untouched. Freshman year I was naïve enough to believe that it would feel that way forever.
I visited home several times my first semester of freshman year, every time relieved when I felt the sting of nostalgia for the familiar and the history my town held. I slowly began to feel something else, which can only be described as a feeling of pride that in some sense I had successfully moved on, without getting too far away from my roots.
Second semester of college is a lot different from the first. Where there was nervousness and introductions and uncertainty, there is security. Second semester, you realize that without noticing it you have made a life there. The friends, who were once from circumstance, remain out of necessity. Contact with friends from home becomes less frequent and less desperate. You realize that you have not only fought through the transition that you’ve anticipated for years, but you’ve conquered it and come out the other side.
To say that I am an enemy of change would be an understatement. I crave stability and comfort to function. I fought every ending of the school year, every move from house to house and refused to acknowledge series finales. Being at school where everything was constantly new and changing, I took solace in the idea that home would forever be a time capsule for the life I had before I left for college.
I left my first year of college with nothing but good memories, feeling like it was everything that a first year of college should be, and in so many ways, it was. I had made good friends, had decent grades, and felt at home there. It wasn’t until I took down the pictures on my dorm wall, filled with parties of senior year and homecomings and proms that I realized how far away I felt from those times.
I was sure that I could abandon home for as long as I wanted and would come home and everything would feel just as it always had. Coming home for summer, everything looked the same as it always had. But it appeared that life had kept moving in my absence. The houses that had once been filled with parties and the stadiums once filled with glitter looked the same, but my memories no longer felt fresh. My best friends and I had lived separate lives from one another that would only ever be able to be summarized. Everything looked the same, but I wasn’t homesick for a place, I was homesick for a time that no longer existed.
Come fall, I was sure that I would finally feel like I had come back into my life. I would no longer feel the wear of a long trip; I would feel like I had come back home. My life picked up just as it had before. I saw all the same people, did the same things, but I still felt the gnawing feeling of dissonance that I hadn’t fully come back. I was still waiting to feel like I had settled in, unpacked, and my trip had become a good memory.
It wasn’t until I was a couple weeks into school and fully immersed in sophomore year that I finally felt like I had a routine, that I started to feel comfortable being back at school. I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I was denying my hometown of 18 years by finding comfort in a place that had only been mine for a fraction of that time. I would sit in the library studying, or attempting to, and I would still start to feel the tiredness that only used to come from a road trip, that was just a few days too long. I would leave the library tired of school and tired of travel.
It wasn’t until I would come home to my roommates that I would feel like I had finally begun to recognize my surroundings again. My apartment was cozy and homey, with all my belongings taking up the shelves. But the home I felt wasn’t in the built-in bookshelves or in the green armchair. It wasn’t even in the welcome mat at the front door. It was in the comfort of coming home to people, the three hellos I got walking through the door; the feeling that I belonged to something.
Home isn’t one place. Home is a feeling that may come and go. We find it in our houses, where everything remains in one place. We find it in our work, in the things that we become passionate about, the projects we pour our hearts into. We find it in people, our old friends who remind us who we were, and our new friends who show us who we can be. Home is in the nostalgia for the familiar, for the twinge of sadness that reminds us of a different lost time. Home isn’t a place. It isn’t permanent.
Coming home as a sophomore is different. It is a place to run away to, a fridge full of food, where your parents are, and where laundry is free. As a sophomore, you can come home to return to the comfort and leave with the confidence of knowing you’ll be okay when you do.
I still get the same feeling of familiarity, when I come home from school and see the streets that I’ve seen a million times, my high school, the corn fields.
To someone who didn’t grow up here, it wouldn’t look special. In reality, I guess it isn’t. It looks like any other suburban town in Pennsylvania. But to me, it’s so much more than that. It’s the place of so many firsts. First steps and first kisses. First loves and first heartbreaks. In the final summer here before school, it held a lot of lasts. Last sleepovers. Last football games. Last goodbyes. It’s where I met my best friends. Where I was a kid and where I grew up. I realized that this home wouldn’t change. It is in coming back to a place that has remained the same that I realized how much I had changed. My past was here, but my future was somewhere else.
