I don’t have a home.

By Alison Morris

I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, a small, obnoxiously pleasant city about an hour south of Minneapolis. Technically, I suppose, it’s home. Three and a half years ago, I left for a place much more suited to my personality: Boston. Since my emancipation from the Midwest, my time spent in Minnesota has dwindled. Now, in my last year of college, I return only for a couple of weeks over the holidays and summer.

Home doesn’t feel much like home anymore.

In Minnesota, the weather is worse, the buildings are shorter, and the food is blander, but these measurable I’m-not-in-Boston-any-more differences aren’t the changes that make home less homey. There is without question an intangible disconnect between my two lives—old and new.

Call it growing up, call it fleeing the nest, call it whatever you please, but the feeling of being without a home is a symptom shared by the typical college student. Torn between the world that raised us and the world we’ve made our own, any sense of feeling wholly settled is fleeting.

Separated by half a continent from my friends and family, it seems the emotional rift is even greater. Friends with whom I used to spend every bell-scheduled day have crafted out of metaphorical strings and sealing wax lives entirely separate from mine. Bound only by stories past, the cross over of our Venn diagram lives has been compacted into a left-over version of ourselves. The places I used to consume cultural comfort food feel less familiar, the mixing bowls have moved to a new cabinet in the kitchen without my knowledge, and I’m not sure if home is here, there, or anywhere.

I wonder if, perhaps, this feeling of impermanence is the key to separating college students from other groups in the layered social strata of our interpersonal structure. Does the temporary existence of our college life emit the recklessness of youth before we’ve fully reached Adulthood with a capital A? And does home take on a new meaning when the things we know and love are spread thin across the geography of our biography?

The answers are muddled, but I know one thing we can all hold as truth: home is where you make it.

Image: Home