“Oh, I’m just going home this weekend,” is a frequent phrase I hear from friends during the school year. Whenever I do, though, I feel a little jealous. Not because I necessarily want to go home, but because I don’t even know what ‘home’ is to me.

See, it’s hard to find a place for me to call home. I was born in India, moved to the Netherlands right after, and three years after that moved to Singapore. While I did grow up in Singapore, as soon as I graduated high school, I was off to Michigan for college. So it’s slightly harder for me to explain to people that yes, I’m Indian, I haven’t lived in India, I’m from Singapore, and also have an American accent.

It runs deeper than just explaining to people where I’m from. As the poem by Ijeoma Umebinyuo so perfectly explains, I am “too foreign for home, too foreign for here, never enough for both.” Even though I spent the majority of my life in Singapore, I never felt as though this was home. I was too foreign, too international to assimilate into the local community, maybe partly because I went to an international school. Because I never lived in India, I am too foreign to call my birthplace my home.

I am now stuck in some limbo, where I am coming to terms with the fact that college is only a temporary home. At the end of my four years here, I will set off and move to an unknown place, something hopefully very different from the places I have lived before. I feel as though I have been trying to find a place that feels familiar enough for me to call home — something that won’t probably happen in a very long time.

As I look back and reflect, I have noticed that I have found a sense of home in the people I know and love, whether those people are my parents or my friends. The people in my life give me a sense of familiarity, of comfort, and of home. My closest friends in college have become my family and my home and have given me the feeling of what I hope home will feel like someday.

Although I feel almost nomadic in a sense, I wouldn’t have it any other way.