I’ve had plenty of practice uprooting my life and resuming it elsewhere, a survival skill acquired due to my dad’s military job. As the heart-shaped sign in our current kitchen reads, “Home is where the Air Force sends us.”
Until the age of thirteen, I’d never spent more than three years in one location; by the time I turned eighteen, I’d lived in six different places. My life has been scattered across four states (Arizona, Hawaii, California, California again, and Virginia) and one foreign country (Germany).
In August, the list expanded to include Manhattan, home of my dream school, NYU.
For the first time, I was the one who had chosen my destination. My newest relocation was not a side effect of the U.S. Air Force’s big-picture goals; I was following my own big-picture goals.
But that deviation brought me states away from my family. They’re still riding out the Washington, D.C. assignment that brought us to suburban Virginia five years ago. After such a miraculous length of time in one place, we all think of Virginia as home.
When college introductions inevitably turn to “Where are you from?" I say Virginia with minimal hesitation. Sometimes I embellish it with “Northern,” lest the person I’m speaking to thinks of cows rather than aggressive drivers.
But strictly speaking, that answer isn’t true. I’ve had a lot of homes.
I was born in Arizona. My name is Turkish because if I’d been born six weeks premature instead of three, it would have happened in Turkey.
I decided to become a writer in Hawaii.
Learned how to ride a bike and write in cursive in Germany.
Started my first novel in Los Angeles, California.
Spent every summer in my grandparents’ pool in upstate New York.
Grieved my first dead pet in Vacaville, California.
Lost my first tooth in Hawaii.
Said my first words in Arizona.
Had my first kiss in Virginia.
Graduated kindergarten in Hawaii, elementary school in L.A., middle school and then high school in Virginia.
Virginia was my longest home, and my most recent. And toward it, I hold a loyalty unrivaled by any other place.
But whenever I’m overtaken by homesickness here at college, it isn’t a place I long for.
It’s my family. For 18 years of my life, we were a team. A unit. It was us against and around the world.
I’ve had to abandon almost every friend I’ve ever known. I can only remember houses in snatches: the kitchen chairs in Hawaii, the swingset so close to the fence in Vacaville, the automatic window shades in Germany, the backyard view of Catalina Island in Los Angeles.
But none of it mattered. I was on an adventure with the four people I loved most, and if my life diverged from everyone else’s in the world, at least it was parallel to theirs. Everything around me changed just as I adjusted to it, but not them.
Until now.
And I am abruptly learning that “Virginia” is too simplistic an answer for where I call home, but not for the reasons I thought. Not because the ghosts of everywhere else I’ve made a niche in the world demand recognition.
Home is not where the Air Force sends us. Home is where we are together.
I assumed my history of moves would be an advantage come college. In fact, it’s only made the transition harder. There is a special kind of bond between family members whose only permanent bonds are with each other. In severing that bond—or rather, stretching it—I have truly changed everything.
But I have also learned that, despite what I’ve always believed while crisscrossing the map, I do have a home. I’ve had it all along.
