I had this moment a few weeks ago sitting at my desk: Shoes kicked off, knees pulled up to my chest, ankles crossed beneath me, gripping a lipstick-stained mug of coffee to nurse my mini-hangover, the result of my body unfortunately telling me, though I am young, am an not as young as I used to be. I had swaddled myself in my oversized white sweater, complete with elbow patches, and my hair was tied back in a messy pony and I had my glasses positioned on the bridge of my nose just so I only looked through them when glancing down at the manuscript I was proofreading for edits. And as I continued my work, a slow smile began to spread across my face. I don't think I have ever felt more content in a moment. I thought to myself, "I am so sad that I don't get to come back to this desk until Wednesday, and I cannot believe this job is not what everyone on this Earth wants to do for the rest of their lives," which is a little dramatic, but still. That's how I felt, and I couldn't quite place my finger on the emotion.
Ever since being back from Edinburgh, I've been struggling to define the term 'home' for myself. I know it can be a place, but to me it is not. I know it can be a person, but to me it is not. And for a very long time I was at a loss as to what it was.
There's this feeling that I get when I come home from a long day: when the lights are all dark and the glow of my alarm clock makes me miss my childhood nightlight and crawling into my empty bed feels just a little too lonely. It is in these moments that I lay still, close my eyes, and listen. Through the thin walls of my overpriced city apartment I can hear the faint snores of my roommates, and a little bit of that fear washes away. Just their presence give me a sense of security: an emotional TUMS for my soul when I've climbed that far inside my own head, it comforts me like a hug from my mother. I have tried for months to put into words the gratitude and love that I have for the intelligent, strong, driven women I live with and each time I try, I fail. I have never known a love so visceral that was not cast in blood.
But it finally hit me today, that the reason I could not define what I was feeling, and the reason there was a continuous struggle to define home, was because they were each other's definition, just unconventionally. I created a new feeling. I'm calling it home. I feel home. Not the noun, it's nothing tangible, but the adjective. The emotion. I feel home. (On the off chance that anyone besides my sister gets this reference- it's like when the janitor in Scrubs feels "mop." He feels mop, I feel home, and the laugh track plays happily.)
I'm not sure if I've ever written about this, but I have thought about it for countless hours. Whenever I am happy, really happy, I spoil the feeling for myself. All I can think about is how ephemeral that moment is. Especially at this point in my life, everything has a foreseeable end. I become nostalgic for a moment that has not yet passed. This happened at the end of sophomore year, then again before going abroad, then again while abroad. I was pretty caught up in my own bubble of unhappiness and uncertainties last semester to experience that same feeling, but then summer came.
It's nice when life is cyclical in a good way. The lows end, friendships become closer again, financial security seems probable once more, etc. But this feeling followed such a close pattern, that when I came back from my short break at home, I was already anticipating the anticipation of the end. I had a great internship, I lived with my best friends, I had my car in DC: I was going to have a great summer and I was dreading the end before it even began. Do I sound crazy yet? I'm a little crazy. There's a point to this, I promise.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I was convinced that I would be spending my collegiate years in Boston studying journalism and having the goddamn time of my life. When I toured Boston University, I fell in love. It was my first college tour and I was impressionable and had no idea what I wanted out of a university except for it to be nothing like the one my parents and sister all attended (can you say #teenageangst) so BU seemed like a good deal. But looking back nearly six years later, there is only one thing that I can remember about BU, and it virtually has nothing to do with the university itself. I picked up a magazine in the School of Communications, which must have been their literary magazine or something similar. It was the December 2011 issue, and I flipped to a random page. On this page was a personal essay written by a Junior journalism student. It was essentially a love letter to her roommates, in which she thanked them for shaping her into the person she had become, for all the nights they stayed up late, or held her hair, or made her soup when she was sick, or brought her books to campus, or any number of countless things good friends do for each other. I don't even remember really what she said. But she said it with such affection, with so much warmth in her words, that when I finished reading that essay all I wanted to do was crawl onto the couch in her apartment, wrap myself in the love that lived that, and gaze out of her twinkle-light lined windows at the Citco sign instead of studying for finals (ok turns out I remember a little bit of what she said). And since I knew I couldn't do that, I settled for wishing desperately that when I finally went to college, I, too, would find home in a feeling.
It isn't just my room and my apartment being the coziest of spaces. It isn't just my best friends sleeping a door or two away. It isn't just a rewarding job that I'm passionate about, or having a solid career plan, or a *bangin'* hair cut. It's all of it together in an insanely powerful way- so powerful that it has broken the cycle. For the first time in almost two years, I am not afraid of the good things ending. I'm not nostalgic for this moment yet because I'm l i v i n g it.
If there's anything I've learned from the past six months, it's that home is neither a place nor person. Rather, it is a state of mind. And I've also learned that most things are just that: state of mind. And maybe, and this is highly possible though it pains me to admit it, this isn't really a revelation to most of you. Maybe all of my going ons about growing up and figuring life out aren't really news. Maybe they are just the inescapable truths of life filed away under the-things-we-don't-tell-the-kids-and-let-them-figure-out-on-their-own, with Santa and politics and the way to drink their coffee; things that can be taught, but in their teaching lose the value of the lesson to be learned. If you tell someone Santa the person is not real, they may grow to be suspicious of all the magic and wonder that graces the world, and if you teach someone to like their coffee black, they'll miss out on the indulgence of a vietnamese iced coffee or the comfort of a vanilla latte on a rainy September afternoon. And if you tell someone home is confined to where they are from or where they grew up, or confined to the person they love or the people they share their nightmares with over morning coffee, they will spend their whole life searching for that thing and for that feeling. They will spend their whole life failing to realize that the one common denominator throughout all of those people and places is themselves, and that so long as they themselves are living they can be home.
