There is a saying that has settled itself in the back of my mind, especially at this time in my life; my transition into university.
“Home sometimes is not a place, it’s a feeling.”
I know plenty of people that get this feeling in the presence of an adorned idol or a towering crucifix. For others, it comes in the swell of a song’s crescendo or in the satisfying crack of a bat’s impact with a ball. You feel it in the warmth of a hand intertwined with yours. Sometimes it comes in a single line of a five-hundred page book, a mere line that engraves itself deeper and deeper into the crevices of one’s brain with every reread.
This feeling is safety and solitude, unique to each and every one of our souls.
This quote sits quietly at the corner of my mind. It is not loud and obnoxious, like a song stuck in your head. It is not a Bible verse or a spiritual mantra, something repeated in meditation. It’s a gentle comfort I wrap myself in in periods of homesickness.
Before college, home was the one-story house in Fairfield, Connecticut that I returned to every day from school. It was domestic, a place where I ate, slept, watched TV, and spent time with my family. It was the house I grew up in, where I spent birthdays and lazy days, where I screamed at my parents then hugged them the day after. It was the house I learned to eat with forks and spoons and the house where I hung my high school diploma.
That house is now two hours away.
These days, the initial shocks of homesickness have mellowed to a dull ache. For the longest time in the beginning of the school year, I was grasping for something familiar, searching for feelings I only ever got in that house. But, “Home sometimes is not a place, it’s a feeling.”
And I found it. I found it in the life I live now, a life completely different than the one I left in September. For me, home is the feeling I get with my friends during our all-nighter movie marathons of Princess Diaries and Harry Potter. I feel it wandering the city of Providence alone, watching the ducks swim home and the sun set fire to the water. I feel it dancing under fairy lights in a tiny dorm room, chanting out throwback songs until the RAs tell us to shut it off. I feel it when my friends and I speed down the highway at midnight, our heads and arms sticking out the windows, Boys Like Girls blasting on the stereo.
These are the feelings that follow me, no matter how far I am from my house and the people I grew up with. I find solace in these moments, these people, and these pastimes that make me realize that there’s no place I’d rather be than where I am at that second.
I spent a lot of my life wondering what it would be like to leave that one-story house in Fairfield. What it would be like to say goodbye to my brother who taught me how to enjoy life and my mother that fought for me before I could fight for myself. I wondered if I would ever be able to stand on my own two feet, and I wondered if the pain of homesickness would ever send me stumbling backwards. I don’t worry about that anymore. I realize now that wherever I go, I’m home.
