Emily Hoeven | The puzzle of home

Growing Pains | An attempt to come to terms with having multiple homes

By Emily Hoeven 10/20/15 12:21am

There is a poem by Philip Larkin called “Home is so Sad.” The first several lines read: “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left/ Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/ As if to win them back.” These lines themselves are so sad. They evoke the idea of something patiently waiting for you to return, not knowing if or when you’ll come back or why you left in the first place.

Many of us grow up hearing “Home is where the heart is.” But what does that mean? How do we, as college students, reconcile that when we no longer have a single place to call home? Part of me has been formed here in Philadelphia, but a huge chunk of who I am is irrevocably, permanently rooted in California, with the people and in the home where I grew up. The first time I went home on break last year, I teared up when I walked into my room. It felt like eons since I had been there, and yet nothing could have been more familiar. All of my pictures on the wall. The way the light came through the windows. Even my shampoo in the bathroom. Everything exactly as I had left it. I hadn’t been home for three months, but the physical spaces that I had occupied made it seem like I had never left. It felt so natural to slip back into place. Re-sync.

But my chair waiting for me at the dining table couldn’t tell me that my brother had grown two inches and developed a deeper voice. Or that just as I had been experiencing new things and making my own memories in college, my family had also been embarking on their own adventures and creating memories between the three of them. They had instituted new family traditions, like eating Saturday afternoons at a restaurant I’d never been to before, and had inside jokes I couldn’t completely relate to. Similarly, I often found myself referencing people, places and acronyms they weren’t familiar with. As we talked over dinner, I tried to bridge the gap between seeing their three faces on a pixelated screen for months, 3,000 miles away and with a three-hour time difference, and suddenly seeing them in person, in the same dimension, in the same time zone.

Coming home is like trying to put together a puzzle. You know what the puzzle pieces of you and your family and friends precollege looked like, but when you come home and try to reinsert yourself into those previously occupied spaces, you discover that you don’t fit exactly the same way you used to. Your shape has changed, and so have the shapes around you. The environment has shifted in subtle ways, and you have to feel your way around the new territory. You have to find your place in the delicate spider web of relations.

And you have limited time to do so. Now there is an end date associated with home. There is an inherent urgency in trying to maximize every second with family while still seeing friends and eating favorite foods and catching up on favorite shows and reading for fun, all in the space of a month. But there are only so many hours, so many meals, so many conversations before you’re getting your suitcase out of your closet again. Driving to the airport at the crack of dawn. Every second on the plane widening the gap that you had just closed. From one world to another in a matter of hours.

What makes home so sad — so complex, so bittersweet — is that when you go home you feel this tug between the way things were and the way things are. You feel the difference between “home” and “visiting home.” And in a couple of years we’ll face this situation from another angle. We’ll have to create new homes for ourselves, separate from college, separate from our childhood homes. Add new places and new faces to those that have shaped our identities.

So maybe it’s impossible to concretely define home. Home is a shifting, fluid amalgamation of experiences, a puzzle that is never really completed. But it must be something close to the feeling that I get when I step off the plane and see the faces of my parents and brother through the crowds at the airport. Here at last.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College sophomore from Fremont, Calif., studying English.  Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” appears every other Tuesday.

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