“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

"You can't be in two places at once!" How many times have you heard that phrase? Normally, I wouldn't give it a second thought. Lately, though, I've been feeling more and more like it's turned into some kind of ironic mantra. As someone who's grown to develop an identification of home in more than one place, I've had to deal with stronger and stronger feelings of fracture as I struggle with the fact that home, for me, isn't as easily defined as it used to be.

I grew up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania where everyone knew everyone. Up until college, I had even lived in the same house my entire life. But in August of 2013, I picked up everything and moved almost 135 miles away from my little town to embark on a journey that would not only change me completely as a person, but would radically transform everything I thought I knew about home, and what that means.

When I got to college, I didn’t think of it as my home by any means for months; maybe even my first year or two. Glenside, PA was “school” to me; I always looked forward to coming back to Carbondale for the holidays, and weekends home felt restorative and reassuring. But the further along I progressed in my education, and the longer I spent in Glenside, the more I realized that I didn’t quite belong in Carbondale anymore. After all, I would go for weeks and even months without being “home.” And when I finally did go back, Carbondale would look different. I had the unsettling realization after a few years of living on my own (and even having the opportunity to travel abroad) that home looked smaller.

And then there were the curious new feelings of comfort and nostalgia that I was starting to associate with my new home in Glenside. I would go home to Carbondale for a holiday break and find myself missing my college campus desperately. I wanted to walk around Arcadia again, toting six books in my arms and feeling like I had someplace important to be. I missed visiting the Glenside Dunkin’ Donuts, where I was a regular. I missed driving down the streets in Glenside and seeing the shops and communities that I now saw much more often than those back home in Carbondale.

These conflicting feelings of identification with two places came to a head one random weekend in my late freshman or early sophomore year that I had come home to Carbondale, and someone asked when I was going to leave town and return to Glenside. Not thinking, I answered, “well, I have an online exam at 6:00, so I need to be home by at least 5:00—”. I caught myself. I had just used the word “home” to describe Glenside. And from that point on, I realized I would never really be able to answer the question, “where’s home?” the same way again.

Of course, I still view Carbondale as one of my homes. It always will be. But now, as a senior in college who has spent three and a half years building a life of my own in Glenside, I can’t pretend that Glenside isn’t home to me, too. I’ve left my footprints all over both places. Both places have a presence in me. And when I get a desperate feeling of homesickness, sometimes it’s not always for the same place.

If “home” in Glenside means school, and the English department, and my college friends, then who am I when I go back to Carbondale without all those things? And if “home” in Carbondale means my family, and my pets, and my hometown best friends, who am I when I go home to Glenside without all those things?

Whenever I transition from one place to the other, I often find myself struggling for days to adjust. I feel guilty, because I can feel myself alienating my friends and loved ones during this period. I feel loneliness when I have to leave everything that defines me in Glenside, then I feel guilty for missing that part of my life, because it means being without everyone in Carbondale. And then I feel worse, because even that guilt can’t make me stop missing Glenside. Trying to reconcile these feelings as I redefine what home means for me is very difficult, and something I still struggle with to this day.

I’m not sure I’ll ever fully come to grips with being split in this way, but I do know that living in two places has forever changed the way I view the world. My perspectives have been forced to expand, pushing me to become a more open-minded person with a better understanding of my place in the larger world, and for that, I will always be thankful.