At risk of sounding like a college kid who’s halfway through a semester and nursing a cold (oh, wait), but I miss my mom’s cooking.

I’m currently trying to finesse a home cooked meal in my tiny dorm room with instant rice and an egg that’s been soft-boiled into runny, onsen-style perfection via thermos. It works well enough — thanks, YouTube — but a meal eaten while sitting in these weird rocking chairs is very different from one eaten around your family’s dinner table.

You might know the one. It’s been beaten up and spilled on and kicked around; an old, weathered, wooden thing that you grew up around.

I’m not really sure where my family table is.

We donated ours when we moved out of our house of 14 years, so that table will presumably suffer even more abuse if its new owners have children that are anything like I used to be. The move happened near the end of my senior year of high school, which was basically the exact same time that I decided that I really, really liked my hometown. Everyone at school always complained that Cupertino, California was boring and that they couldn’t wait to leave, so I didn’t even realize that I had left my heart there until I left.

Moving (admittedly a short distance) away with the promise of soon leaving for college was too quick of a transition for me to really respect. I stayed in town for hours after school by attending every soccer game our team played and by eating with friends instead of at my dinner table. Every weekend, I managed to go back to the town that I couldn’t wait to leave — not an easy task for someone who can’t drive. But now, in my sophomore year of college, Cupertino isn’t my world anymore, and I’ve never truly settled into Santa Clara either. That table, the nucleus of my childhood? Could be anywhere in the Bay Area and beyond.

So saying that I’m homesick now feels like looking for something that isn’t there. Like trying to catch smoke with my bare hands. I'm too used to having roots to be floating like a spore.

But the perfume of osmanthus blossoms that lingers around a certain segment of my daily walk to class? That’s the smell of home. The reruns of San Jose Sharks’ games that The Lair soundlessly plays are home. Home is my tiny dorm room, where I can video chat my parents at weird hours because they’re living an 11-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean away and having more fun than I am. It’s the little things that remind me of something I concretely used to have.

I’m sure you have those little reminders too. I’m not even close to being the most far-flung kid at this school, so maybe I’m not one to talk, but consider touching base with whatever and whomever you might have left behind before this little campus in Stockton became your everyday life. They might be homesick, too.