Throughout my life, I have bluntly categorized myself as someone incapable of missing people or places. I never miss my parents when they go on trips. I didn’t miss my friends during the pandemic. I didn’t miss my high school after graduating. I don’t experience longing because I know they will be there when they, or I, return.
When I went to college, my older moved-out brother assured me that the nostalgia of “home” would go away within the first forty minutes of being moved out. He was right. I haven’t thought about the hometown traditions that have passed me by. I haven’t stalked current seniors at my high school to see what they wore to football games. I don’t even miss my bedroom, which I crafted over the span of my moody adolescents. Since moving into my dorm, I’ve been reluctant to visit home for the first time. I didn’t want to dismantle the stoic attitude I embodied during my three weeks at college. I was worried that my philosophy about “missing” was wrong and that visiting for a short twenty-four hours would reveal that I did, in fact, miss home.
My dad picked me up on a Friday afternoon from campus, and we headed to my old high school’s tennis match. I had wanted to go after the team’s posts of bus rides, pasta parties, and pregame chants bombarded my Instagram feed. When we got to the school, I snuck onto the bleachers and waited for the girls to finish their matches. As they left the court, my former teammates’ lightly sweated faces would turn from deflated energy to rejoiced shock. I was welcomed with many ebullient hugs, shifting me off my balance.
I struggled to regain my stability and, with it, security with the period of life I found myself in. I was uncomfortable that I was now a role model, answering questions about adulthood and college life. I was in an old environment I only knew as a high schooler. After catching up on the high school drama of who was dating who and what teachers got fired, I said my many goodbyes and went home to spend a quiet night with my parents.
“I struggled to regain my stability and, with it, security with the period of life I now found myself in.”
When I entered my house for the first time in weeks, I was welcomed by a noticeable scent. It was not an odor, not a stench, but the phenomenon known as a “house smell.” Every house has a distinct smell, but the inhabitants never smell the one associated with their home. However, as I wafted in hints of vanilla, my absence placed me as a guest in my own house.
I began to understand that I had returned to a place that wasn’t the way I had left it. I didn’t miss home because “home” rejected me as a glitch in its system–an unrecognized rendition that didn’t fit an old mold. “Home” reminded me of the threshold I was standing on—one foot in the past and one foot in the future. “Home” wasn’t the specific place I had grown up; “home” was the version of myself I had known all my life that I began to grow away from.
When I think of my future, I feel a swelling in my chest as if my breath and the breath of my future self are one. This link across time signals that the world has things in store for me that I cannot yet fathom. I, along with all new college students, must lean into “growing away” because it is a chance to “grow towards” the future, to dream of life’s limitless possibilities.