When you first leave for college, you hold your hometown close like a memory you’re scared to lose. The friendships you made in high school still sit at the center of your world. It feels like the life you left behind lives in a bubble, it feels safe and protected. But the moment you start settling into college, something unexpected happens, a feeling of guilt and separation. There is a quiet realization that you’re changing in ways the people back home can’t always see.
Slowly your college town starts to feel different. Familiar. Almost like it’s choosing you back. Moving to college is one thing, but actually embracing where you are and who you’re becoming is something entirely different. You build a new life piece by piece, a job, a major, clubs, maybe even Greek life. You realize you can’t just show up and expect to feel belonging, you have to find it and let yourself be open to it. But once you do, something close to magic happens. You create a life curated to what your needs and dreams are. You do things younger you would have never even imagined. You pour energy into what matters most to you. You grow into someone who is building a future, not just waiting for one. But with all of that new beauty comes a new kind of heart ache.
The first break of the semester and honestly every break after hits different. You go back home, back to the place that raised you and somehow it doesn’t fully feel like “home” anymore. There’s this sense of something you left behind. The memories you made in your college town belong only to you, no one back home shares them. Driving through your hometown after months away is a strange experience. You know exactly where you are but you no longer feel fully grounded there. Something feels…off. It all feels familiar but foreign at the same time. But maybe this means you’re doing something right. Maybe the feeling of a missing piece is just the longing of your college friends, your “new” routine, and all of the little jokes and memories you’ve created in your college town. And sometimes without even noticing it you catch yourself calling your college town “home” in a conversation. It just seems to slip out.
There’s a special kind of tension in belonging to two places at once. Your college town isn’t just where you study. It becomes the place where you learn who you are. Where you learn what it actually takes to succeed. Where you meet people who change you for the better. This feeling of the tug from both your hometown and your college town doesn’t really go away. At least it hasn’t for me. I still have the idea of having two homes and two places that shaped me in two completely different ways. And I wonder, will every place I live leave this kind of mark on me? Or did I just get lucky enough to be loved so fully in my college town? Either way, belonging to two places at once is very bittersweet. It means we have lived deeply enough that a single home could never hold all of who we are now.