I finished my sophomore year of college three days ago. Homecoming is usually a very happy affair. I love being in my house, it smells like laundry, my dog is thrilled to jump all over me, my little sister and I squash our beef long enough for her to say she missed me, my mom literally beholds me just standing in the kitchen, and I get to watch my father flip through movies on cable (score!). But my parents are vacationing without us in St. Lucia for the week. This is something that they’ve been doing recently as their daughters all leave the house, which is something I try not to think about. Instead, I think about them in reverse, as children. I ask my grandparents what they were like. Were they talkative or shy to a fault, like I was? Were they close with their own grandparents? What did my dad think of living in Germany on an army base? What was it like for my mom to grow up with such a young mother? Or I look in photo albums from when they were my age and I see my dad on spring break, playing soccer on the beach (my mom was on that trip too but they weren’t together and didn’t dream they ever would be), or my mom in her freshman dorm, the same as mine, smiling on the phone with Monet’s water lilies behind her. This assuages the guilt, because I realize that they were full people before me and they continue to be full people after me.

In any case, I came home to a dark and silent living room, because my mom isn’t home to watch Dateline or my dad to watch a soccer game, and I spend long days alone with my weird dog while my sister is at school.

I won’t say it, but I love being in my hometown. If I wasn’t aware that other people hated it so much, I’d probably tell the truth. But you’re made to feel infantile about liking home at this age. I can’t help that going to college makes me think about origins; going away makes me think about coming back. Not in the sense that I am vying to leave college, no, I’ve grown to like it in Charleston. More on that later. It’s the living a life away from home that makes me look at home as home, not just the place I’m from. Obviously I’m from my hometown, it’s in the name- I was born here, I grew up here, I come back here. But it’s truly Heimat. I belong here. Everything is familiar. The reason my first year of college was so difficult, I think, was because I begged for familiarity where there was none. My friends were new and I wasn’t comfortable around them yet. The city was a maze to me. Even the way I dressed and looked was strange and unlike me. All so unfamiliar. All so foreign. But my first winter break, I came back and realized that there is great belonging to be found in knowing a place and being comfortable there. Especially when I had been living with the opposite for months. How strange is it that being away from home makes you long for it so? I can drive almost without thinking and get anywhere in my hometown. When I drive past a store, I name the three stores that it was before the current one. I have a memory on every street in town, or a story to tell: this church is where my grandparents met. This intersection is where I rear ended an old woman on the way to tennis practice. This is where I went to court for said rear-ending. This Mexican restaurant parking lot is where I laughed the hardest I’ve ever laughed. Being in a town that I know innately and being around my family, whose judgement I never fear like I do my friends’, is like wearing clothes out the dryer. When I think of home, I think of the way my mom hugged me after my piano teacher died when I was 10. Something you need, and something you long for.

Maybe you notice I’m doing some selective remembering here. Living away from home also splits you in two. Before and after. Home and away. I live “away” everyday, but what does “home” mean? More accurately, who is “home” me? Again, a split. There’s “home” me now, when I come back and it’s like breathing, and then there was “home” me when I couldn’t breathe at all.

These are actual quotes from my diary in senior year of high school.

“I was publicly mad today. I have not slept in my bed for a month. This is turmoil and I can’t wait for it to be over.”

“[redacted] keeps on making digs at me, joking, and I continue to take her seriously. Then she gets upset that I’m upset, then I feel guilty for being upset, then I realize that I’m just not made for friends.”

“These days I look like the painting of Ivan the Terrible after he killed his son. Just absolute horror and regret.”

If this diary was the only knowledge of me you had, you would have mistaken my hometown for the Somme, or a gulag, or literal Tartarus. You would have confused me for Franz Kafka. You would have thought I was Nanny McPhee-level ugly. It was never that serious. Maybe lick a Xanax????? It seems irrational now, but that’s the split. My friends during this time know, they so know, that everything seemed final and world-ending. Everything was a big deal. I remember writing a history exam, and I didn’t do as well as I wanted. I ranted to my friends about how I probably failed it and my life was over (I was that kind of person), and one of them touched my shoulder and told me it would be okay. Like I was in some soap opera, I shook her hand off my shoulder in a huff. “It’s not okay, though!” Wallows in self-pity… laments impending death… exit.

Suffice to say “home” me at that time was barely a person. My older sister talked to me once about a ketamine treatment for PTSD that she learned about in her psych class. That it can open up all of your neural pathways so a professional can talk you through a new thought pattern, because you default to old ones. That thought patterns are like worn down roads. That people grow to have one-track minds. During that time, I did school. Period. Everything else was white noise. Before I left, I don’t think I could have appreciated my sweet, familiar hometown even if I wanted to.

Of course there are other things to say. Doing the same thing every day, making the same drive every day, made me want to tear my hair out. People grew irritated with each other from the proximity and said things I hope they didn’t mean. The drama sent me into shivers; I turned my phone off and hid in my room. There’s a laundry list of reasons why I should still hate it here, just like everyone else. But they don’t linger. As soon as I turn into the driveway of the house I grew up in, I can’t think of a single one.