I was sitting in the backseat of my mother’s car, exhausted after the two overbooked flights full of spring breakers that I had to take from New York City to San Antonio, Texas. Our house was about 45 minutes outside of the airport, but it was a drive I knew very well. We passed the mall, where I found myself almost every day after school senior year, aimlessly perusing Urban Outfitters with a friend I haven’t seen in months.
We passed my old school, where I literally spent the majority of my life from second to twelfth grade and will never step foot in again. We passed the movie theater that I used to go to with my friends after school, wearing the shorts we wore under our uniform skirts and whatever t-shirt or sweatshirt we could find in the back of our cars.
We passed the house I lived in for the last two years of high school, and the house I lived in for the ten years before that. We pulled up to the house that I had moved into a week before I left for school, a house that feels more like a hotel to me and is more and more furnished every time I visited. It may have been the house, or the school, or the mall, but I had this weird disassociated feeling that I wasn’t really home.
Apparently, it’s a common feeling in college. You spend more time at college than your parents’ house, but your dorm never really feels like home. How could it? I share a room with a girl I met the day before I moved in and I live in a city that, even after six months, feels foreign sometimes.
But my parents’ house doesn’t feel like home either, it feels more like I’m visiting my grandparents or maybe an aunt that I haven’t seen in a while. You’re kind of scared to touch things because it doesn’t feel like your house anymore. Your room is too clean and lacking of the personal touches that now adorn your dorm room..the dorm room that also does not feel like home. You see my dilemma?
Maybe it’s different for people who didn’t go to school out-of-state, 2,000 miles away from where they grew up, or instead of living on campus went ahead and got a house or apartment that could actually be theirs. But for us out-of-state, far-away-from-childhood-homes, dorm-residing students, we’re kind of stuck in limbo.
My case may be exaggerated because my parents quite literally live in a new house. Also, for whatever reason, most of my highschool friends had a different spring break than I did, so for most of the week I felt like I was on vacation by myself in the Texas suburbs.
So to anyone who has this odd feeling of homelessness even as your mom makes you the same mashed potatoes that you’ve been eating for nineteen years, you’re not alone. College is weird. The important thing is to make the most out of wherever you are, even if it doesn’t feel exactly like home used to feel.
