Lately I have been seeing a lot of the same types of posts on Facebook and Instagram. I will be scrolling through when I see someone writing out a goodbye to their friends and hometown as they go on to college and leave everything behind. I, too, am going on to college, but for me, it is a slightly different experience, because I have already been living away from home for four years. So while many of my friends are preparing to leave home for the first time, I am leaving home again, and this time, unlike when I left for high school, I am leaving behind another place I have grown to call home.

Almost exactly four years ago, I packed up all of my new books and supplies and got into the car to prepare to completely start over at a new school three hours from home. I was nervous about leaving my friends and family, but really excited to see what was in store for me at my new school. As my time there increased, it stopped being a new, exciting experience and began to become my place. It became so regular in my routine for me to wake up and see my roommate getting dressed too before we headed off to classes together. It became a habit for me to give tours around campus, walk by the school zoo, vacuum the hallways of my dorm at night, or eat every meal in the dining hall with my friends.

As for my friends, even the ones who lived in different dorms, it was so unique from my friendships back home. If I wanted to hang out with them, I would not schedule a time to meet up ahead of time, and instead could just show up in a friend’s room and sit with her while she watched something on Netflix. And we knew so much about each other. Instead of asking “How are you?” or “How was your evening?” the questions over breakfast were always more specific, on the lines of “What time did you wake up to finish the essay?” or “Did you hear about _______ that happened in the dorm last night?” When we left each other after graduation, the promises we made were not to see each other on weekends, but rather to FaceTime and text each other from both our schools and our various homes, however far away we might be from one another.

As I get ready to leave my home, I am not just leaving behind my home with my family and all of the people I know, but also my home of four years with dorms filled with shoes in the hallways, classrooms used for classes (but also for cramming for tests at all hours of the day), a dining hall where we spent hours hanging out and talking even after finishing our meals, and a group of people that made that place a second home.