I feel like I'm hitting that point in my college career where I don't really know where home is anymore. I feel like home is where I have my life, and my routine. But I have a life in two places, a routine in two places, close friends and even family in two places. In Massachusetts, I have Needham and Boston, which are two places that will always be home to me, despite any issues I have with Needham's culture. It's where I grew up, and my loyalties will always be to my hometown and my home city. My house is a different issue; that hasn't felt like home for awhile. I mean, it does. It's my house. But it hasn't been a homey house for years. It's not a place where I can cook or sit on a couch and watch TV or really be anywhere besides eating in the kitchen or hanging out/working in my room. My room is home. But at the same time, my room is home because of my things, and all of the things that I need or use are either here with me in PA or come out of a suitcase when I'm in Needham. That's not really home. Sometimes when I'm there on break, I feel like I'm borrowing my room, inhabiting it for a short time. Sure, everything on the walls is mine, but everything feels dated. The pictures are all from 8th-12th grade; the Sunday comics on my closet door date back to 2006. I was the one who put everything on those walls, but I did it so many years ago, it's like a record of my high school years rather than something that continues to grow and change and be mine. I have a routine in Needham too; I know my way around, I have places I go. But that routine is contingent on my friends' being home at the same time as I am, which doesn't always happen, and then it feels like I'm just going back to this place that I've left, that isn't really mine anymore.
Haverford is home too, and Gummere is home, and my hall and my dorm room are home. But they're homes that will expire on May 15th, at least the Gummere part, and my lease on Haverford is up in May 2013. Can home be home, or as homey as the place I grew up, if it's that temporary? Maybe I'm spoiled to have such a permanent concept of home. But at the same time, I feel like the harder I cling to the Haverbubble, the harder it will be to let go of when I graduate. Yes, I'm clinging hard, and it will be hard. But I always have that in the back of my mind, that one day I have to leave. My room is home, but I have to set it up again every year, and figure out what to put in a suitcase when I go back and forth so that I can feel most comfortable in both places. I don't know yet what will be home next year - maybe Jones - but until January I won't even have a home because I'll be in Argentina, where I'll be living in someone else's house for five months. Once I get back, I'll have a room and a suite and a dorm again, but only for a semester. I definitely feel at home on this campus, in this community, if not in a particular dorm, but as I said before, the community will kick me out after senior year, and life will go on.
I feel like I'm at that stage in life where I don't have a home, or I'm in between homes. That sort of scares me, but it's thrilling at the same time. Whenever I hear stories in movies or from real life of people setting off with nothing, or with a suitcase, or with whatever can fit in the trunk of their car, it terrifies me. I'm so material, and so connected to places and spaces. I don't know how I could ever stand to do that. But at the same time, I kind of want to, just to prove to myself that I can. Maybe someday I will. When I go abroad, I will be doing that in a way, although I'll be coming back afterwards. I'll have to do it when I graduate. I can't use my Needham room as a storage place forever, and once I set out on my own, that room definitely won't be home anymore.
In Garden State, there's this scene where Andrew and Sam are sitting in a pool, and he says to her, "You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.... You'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place."
I don't believe the last part about a family being a group of people that miss the same imaginary place, but the rest of it seems totally legit to me. I feel like my house isn't entirely home anymore, that home is sort of somewhere in between that house and Haverford and the world at large. And I won't be settling down anywhere for awhile, so I guess for the next however many years, home will be in between. I think that'll be good for me though, that rite of passage.
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