At my college, there is a legitimately diverse student body. Not only do my friends hail from disparate parts of the nation--some are international students, too! Going home for break simply isn’t an option for many people; the difficulties of staying connected to family run rampant. Just think about it: time zone differences. Air fare. Holidays apart. Gross.
Those big pains don’t hurt me. My hometown is 25 minutes away from my college--when I got sick, my mom brought me home for a night, and I got to watch "The Theory of Everything" with my siblings. When a friend and I realized that we needed sleeping bags for a weekend retreat, we didn’t use Amazon’s free shipping for college students or a trip to the nearest shopping center. We used my cell phone to call my mom; she brought me some supplies on a Thursday night and took me to a local restaurant so that we could enjoy one another’s company. I have a very convenient family situation--especially when compared to the situations of others.
But that doesn't change the fact that I feel intensely homesick sometimes. There are moments when I want to know exactly what is happening among my family members--what words are being said, what reactions are bouncing back and forth, what underlying patterns are resurfacing in kitchen conversation during the week--I want to know so badly. What’s more, I'm aware that texting, calling, and video-chatting can’t give me the full knowledge that I seek. Because, even though it's fun to hear anecdotes from the day, and even though I appreciate every emoji or real smile that I get to see, I want the experience of being with them, and I want it firsthand; that’s the way I have been conditioned to accept it--and as a result, I still feel vaguely empty even after my brother, sister, and neighbor Facetime me, hyper-enthusiastically answering any questions about their home experiences that I can conjure.
But if my friend from the Philippines can wear a winter hat around campus in September because she is unaccustomed to the climate here, and if one of my friends from Chicago has just witnessed the end of her dedicated relationship partially due to distance-related reasons, then I feel ultra-strange. I know southeastern Pennsylvania’s seasons well, and my boyfriend is at a college only 45 minutes away. So I ask myself: Do I deserve to feel homesick? And if not, what the heck can I do?
When I dismantle the feeling of "missing" into its simplest pieces, I see that it is not truly defined by the distance that separates the miss-er from the missed. I think that someone from another country has more to miss than I do. They miss their culture, while I usually get driven home from my late-night library job by older Safety and Security officers whose familiar Philly area accents remind me of my late Pop-Pop's voice. But there are some things that all college students have the opportunity to miss: the shared experience of life with family, the last home they lived in, the friends that journeyed through high school with them. I miss all of those things. And nobody can quantify how much.
So it would be pointless to continue to ask myself if I "deserve" to miss "home." Home can mean so much. I am confident that I can build a home here at Haverford, but that doesn't break the truth that I have another, very valuable, home situation that needs a bit of missing. Someday, I'm sure that I'll miss Haverford. It won't be dependent on how far I am geographically--it will be fixed to the exciting fact that things change.
