My home is a hilly upstate New York college town that turns gray in the winters, lush in the summers, and beholds the “gorges” title. There is a lot of whimsy and many eclectic people that make the place so pure and unique. I’d never known such people were rare to come by until I’d moved out of state to a largely populated school.
My home is also a pretty and characterful house at the top of a steep hill. It is one that holds my high school memories of consistent post party sleepovers, sibling rivalries, and drastically different eras I sought my way through. It smells like a familiar warmth that rushes nostalgia into my body. Even the sounds in that house carry me to comfort. My mother, an artist, hangs her favorite paintings on the walls in the living room; ones she painted throughout my whole childhood.
My home is specifically (and arguably most importantly) my bedroom. I find significance in putting mementos on the walls and cluttered on my desk; mementos another would call junk. Something about the sign of a human teenage girl living somewhere excites me. There is a sort of beauty in decoration, and a beauty of life. Tangibly, my house and bedroom are my sanctuary.
But alas, this home is being packed up to be rented for months on end. In this peculiar situation, I was originally distraught and almost angry. To me, this action bizarrely distorts where my home is.
In high school, my teacher asked the class to write a narrative on what home was to us. I stuck by my “home is where the heart is” statement; that home is wherever you are settled and the people you meet, the ones who change you along the way.
Now, I am a first year in college. Perhaps after moving, and finding out my childhood house was restricted, my concepts slightly expanded.
Of course there are parts of me that feel at home at school. For example, accidentally staying up late yapping with some of my girls, surrounded by fairy lights and ironic shrines. I’ve found comfort in consistency. I do the same old things every day, but I also feel the anticipation of a relatively large and unfamiliar city staring back at me.
But again, there is a part of me that enjoys the idea of going home for holidays, seeing my family, and my best friends from grade school. A place I used to find reliable for comfort and enjoyment. Subconsciously, it caused me to label it as a tangible home.
However, this tangible place became uprooted. I never thought I would be so lost because a house is off limits. I suppose it’s because this physical structure of a 1940s wood building became my safe haven. One that is constructed of memories and a nostalgia of a real girl’s childhood.
How could my home be taken from me in a time when I’m supposed to go home for the holidays?
This series of events caused me to rethink that highschooler’s idea of home. Maybe a home can be tangible. Perhaps it is understandable to associate consistency with “home”. However, sometimes you don’t have a choice.
Upon returning back to school, I’m no longer ungrateful for certain things that make it hard to like college. I want to cherish what I have created for myself, and I know that there is so much more to create. Years of time! I like to tell myself.
Being put in a situation that I am completely out of control of has taught me that a tangible place doesn’t have to have a real effect on my emotional concept of home. Maybe 15 year old me had a great point, but I also need to acknowledge that these physical places are still embedded in my memories, thoughts, and simply how I carry myself.
There are many homes, tangible and not. The importance of its tangibility is relative, but I am a person who can build experiences that shape my real home.
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