The first time I came back home from Brandeis for break, it felt like something had shifted. All of a sudden, I was visiting home as opposed to living there. I had a suitcase open on the floor and everything felt eerily unfamiliar. This has changed as I’ve gone through the process of coming back home more often, and now it’s an unfamiliarity that I come to expect. However, home will never be quite the same because now each time I come home I know that there’s a date when I’ll have to leave and get on a plane back to Boston. In this way, home has become temporary.
This has changed the way I interact with my home in many ways. For one, I appreciate small things more, like having a kitchen and a bathroom that I don’t share with everyone on my hall. I’m all of a sudden extremely grateful for things like driving a car and going to the beach, both of which I can’t do at Brandeis. However, what makes these things so sweet is the fact that they’re temporary and I know that I only have them for so long. This has led me to wonder what it would be like if we thought of everything as temporary. Would life be better? Or would we be constantly worried that everything’s going to be taken away? Either way, I’ve learned to appreciate the inconsistencies of college, and the constant temporality of where I am.