I have felt a sense of homesickness for much of my life. In fourth grade I moved across Chicago and my life shifted. I do not remember as many details from my life before I moved and I sometimes joke that I became conscious after moving.
But that shift happened because I left something safe and happy and comforting. I insisted that my family wait until after Christmas to move so I could feel at home for one more holiday rather than a homey holiday spent in a house of boxes to unpack and unfamiliar bedrooms.
When I left what I knew as home, I felt like I had to start over again. New friends, new neighborhood, new church, new school, new bedroom: it felt like a new me. I felt this shift a lot again in high school, as I surrounded myself with new people and carved out a new space for myself. I started attaching labels to myself based on my interests and activities, seeing which ones really stuck.
During the Pandemic, I remodeled my room because even though my home had not changed, I felt like I was a stranger living in a middle schooler’s bedroom. I needed my surroundings to reflect who I felt I was on the inside because I was trapped at home.
Moving to college, I had to restart again. The whiteboards on my walls were the same, but suddenly I shared a room again, this time with a delightful stranger. I met roommates and building mates that would become my new home, and I bawled my eyes out leaving for Christmas break freshman year because I could not bear the thought of spending a month away from my new home.
When I got back to my bedroom in Chicago, I swore I had grown because my child-sized bunk bed was so much shorter than my lofted dorm room bed. When I was at school, I cried for my parents and Chicago friends and brother and dog. When I got to Chicago, I cried for my friends and professors and the collegiate sense of freedom.
I felt for the first time not only unable to control my sense of home, but split in two. No matter how I reorganized my furniture, I did not feel complete.
Thankfully, I did not feel alone in this. My roommate was extremely homesick, and when I wrote about my feelings for class or Her Campus, other students related to what I had to say. Even friends who barely moved from home, or even commuted, noted the shift in their routine. It did not seem to matter how far you moved: a shift in your relationship to home is the mark of homesickness, which is not easy, if not impossible, to rub off.
I thought having two incomplete homes was hard. Then, I went abroad. I was welcomed in by a host family and the world was my oyster. But, my heart was still in Chicago. My heart was in St. Louis. My heart was in Boston. My heart was in Omaha.
Getting back to St. Louis my junior year, I felt a sense of quasi-completeness at first. Yet I had scratched a travel itch that no weekend trip could salve. I met a boy abroad and suddenly my heart was in Cleveland, too. Even though that part of my heart is no longer beating how it once was, the summer I spent there changed me fundamentally.
Even after heartbreak, after every move, after every chapter of my life, I am broken into more pieces, flung across the country and even the world. My heart is not big enough to stretch that far. It must break, beat in lonely corners, scattered satellites hoping for re-encounter.
As my senior friends and I thought about the year ending, one of them joked that he would win big at the casino, buy the Coronado apartments, renovate and move everyone he loves in. I also dream about all my favorite people being in the same place, a Coronado 2.0. But even with all the people I love in one place, no place could really feel like “home.”
As I visited family around the country during the summers after my first and second years of college, I realized how wonderful it is to attend a school where people call many different places home. Going to SLU means that I have friends in just about any Midwest city you can name. All it took was a mention of when I was coming to town and suddenly, wherever I went, I would see a little piece of SLU.
Maybe all this time I have not been missing something everywhere. Maybe I am just lucky enough to find home, if even just a sliver, anywhere. One’s sense of home breaks into pieces, but like the art of Kintsugi, the cracks and fractures can be beautiful. Home expands to more places, rather than breaking into a smaller singular. Instead of focusing on the loss, on what is missing, on what can never be squeezed into one big building, maybe I just needed to remember the people who carried little pieces of home wherever they were, because home is not just a place, more often than not, home is composed of other people.
On a short, end-of-semester trip home, as I sat in the room I moved into in fourth grade, renovated in high school and will move back into for the summer after I graduate, I realized that I will always have a home with me; from the south side of Chicago to the north, from Arlington Heights to Lombard to Oak Park, from Omaha to South Korea to St. Louis to Kansas City, from Madrid to Boston to even Manhattan, Kansas. All it takes is a moment of connection and I have sprouted roots without even realizing it.
Before I know it, I will be building a new home in Philadelphia, only to be saying goodbye to it in another year’s short time. But instead of goodbye, instead of feeling like I have lost something, as I am tempted to feel now, I will be reminded that instead of ever having my dream home — where everyone I love lives together under one roof — I am lucky enough to feel at home wherever I am.
I thought that I would need to feel complete to feel at home. I thought that the ruptures in my life were breaks, losses, deaths. But really, the roots grow beneath the surface. My love is a dandelion’s fluff, scattered in the wind, nearly invisible, and yet, blooming wherever it lands, just waiting to be plucked and spread once again.
I can never come back to this moment, but there will always be flowers to smell. SLUlips to remember. Dandelions to wish on. A wildflower bouquet of the love I have gathered, and have been lucky enough to admire, even if the flowers will soon be strewn about.