The day I got home after finishing my first quarter at Northwestern, I updated my Facebook status to “Meredith Wise is perpetually homesick.” Perpetual homesickness was a phrase I picked up from who-knows-which friend or article and decided to apply to myself. I had just said goodbye to my new group of best friends, who still appropriately call each other our “family,” and to the home I had begun to make for myself in Willard.
I came straight from there into the arms of my waiting family (one of which was holding my favorite drive-thru drink) and into my cozy queen-sized bed, but for the first time, I didn’t feel quite home.
When we leave for college and hug our parents goodbye after they devotedly move box after box into our new rooms, we have no choice but to adapt to a new place and cling to new people. And when each quarter ends, and we head our separate ways, it can be just as difficult as it was the first time we left “home.”
It seems that most of my friends are always missing somewhere or someone. When school is in session and we’re all in Evanston, everyone looks forward to their parents’ or high school friends’ visits, and I see Facebook-wall posts from old classmates asking “When do you get home? When can I see you?”
So when breaks finally come and we’ve made the goodbye rounds on campus, we head home for a while to see those we’ve missed. But you only have to give it a few days before your news feed becomes clogged again. This time it’s between your friends at school: “What day do you get back to NU? I know you’re enjoying home, but life is really better when we’re both in Evanston.”
I’m guilty as charged. When I had been home for a few weeks the summer after my freshman year, and I was having a particularly boring evening, my status was “I miss Northwestern.” My great-aunt in Vancouver, Wash. commented, “Meredith, just a short time ago you were missing family. Maybe you should be two or three people?” That’s when I realized that what we students might wish for – never missing any of our friends or family – is completely impossible.
Things get further complicated as we study abroad, when we score awesome summer internships in more new cities, and when we graduate and scatter across the country and the world.
It seems to me that we have two options: never being home or learning to always be home. We must love where we are when we’re there because as soon as we leave, we want to be back again. Most of us are going home for break in a few days or a few weeks, so we should be careful not to fall into the trap of wishing for one home too soon.
Of course they say that “home is where the heart is,” but what does that mean for me, when my heart is split between Evanston, Lubbock, Texas, Barcelona – where I spent my summer – and now all over the world as many of my good friends are abroad this fall?
I’ve made the transition from home to new-home more than once now, so I am confident that I can do it again when the time comes. For now though, I will appreciate both my time in my hometown and my time at school, knowing that I’m lucky to have two homes.
Meredith Wise is a Weinberg junior. She can be reached at [email protected].
