I write this article from day five of my first real break in months. For a week I have been fielding questions of “how are you liking school?”, “how are your roommates?”, and “what are you studying?”. It is weird to be back among non-college students, people who do not already have shared memories and experiences of the place that I have now lived for the past three and a half months. In another light, however, it is also strange to think that I have been away from the place in which I lived for 18 years for so long. I lived in one place for my entire life up until I moved into college on September first, but now, in December of that same year, I have come to consider both my legal address and my college campus “home” in different ways.

It is the norm now to get texts from my roommates at midnight while I am in the library, asking “when are you coming home?”. Accidentally calling going back to the dorm “going home” started weeks ago, and I made a pointed effort to avoid saying it, but in the last couple weeks of this fall semester, I have begun to embrace it, seeing it as rather a variation of the definition of the word than an inaccuracy. After being picked up from school I told my dad I had left my headphones at home, and my dad replied, “which home?”. Perhaps most frightening of all, is when I was on a train back to Boston last week and I opened the “maps” app on my phone to see how far I was from South Station. I was taken aback upon opening the app for the first time in a while, to see that it said “3 hours and 27 minutes to Home”. The map showed me just entering Boston, and I realized that what my phone thought was “Home” was actually Saratoga Springs, NY.

There is a staggering difference between the amount of time that I have lived in Cohasset and the time that I have lived on Skidmore’s campus, but the fact that my entire immediate life is now contained in less than a square mile, and one third of a tiny room, makes the adjustment process that much faster. It didn’t take very long for me to figure out the fastest way to get to the dining hall, or what time of day is best to shower, and I’ve found that having a space that is defined by my choices, and my choices alone (save for the decorating choices of my roommates, which I happen to love), has made college feel just as home-like as the home in which I grew up. We have all heard the old saying that “home is where the heart is”, but what if your heart is in many places at once? While I may be “home” for the holidays, I look forward to returning to my other home on January 22nd.