I have never been more excited or ready for Thanksgiving break than I am this year. I can say this with full certainty as I sit on the fourth floor of Alderman, my eyes feeling scratchy and dry as I stare at my computer screen for the sixth-straight hour, the little white squares on my iCal taunting me with the days left before I’m going home.
“Going home” used to be an expression casually tossed around as I climbed into my car after a day of high school or left my friend’s house after a night spent out, but now, as a fourth-year in college who has spent the past 3 1/2 years living by myself, it means something more, something different.
Going home now means packing up a small parcel of my life here at the University and taking it back to the place that was my life for 18 years. It means sleeping in a room that used to be a definition of who I was, but now feels like a room filled with the posters and books of a friend I lost contact with. These small vestiges seem like a face you once knew, yet one that you cannot put your finger on.
Going home means driving down the streets I used to take everyday, following that familiar bend by the pond in my neighborhood or waiting for that same bump over the asphalt on the main road to my house. Yet there’s a dreamlike quality to doing these things, a strange sentiment of déjà vu — these actions at once familiar, yet simultaneously different and changed.
The notion of “home” is a strange one — I am sure I have mentioned in countless English papers the different connotations and depictions of a home, yet I still couldn’t really tell you what I think it is. Is Charlottesville my home now? Is the sleepy North Carolina town where my parents still live home? Or is home defined by some more abstract definition, one of those cheesy monikers emblazoned across decorative throw pillows —“Home is where there heart is” or some incarnation of that?
Ideally, I think that if I were to construct some perfect notion of home for myself, it would be a hybrid of these ideas: the creativity, intellectual rigor and bustling vivacity of life in Charlottesville; the comforting, easy rhythm and security of my hometown in North Carolina; the love of my smart, talented, funny, inspiring family and friends that make up a large part of where my heart is.
Perhaps this really is some idealized notion, a fabrication only possible when imagined upon the page. Maybe I won’t ever really find some definition of home that encapsulates all of this in wonderful summation. Maybe I’ll continue to feel a sense of uprootedness, of being between chapters of a life without a polished end in mind.
Or maybe I will. Maybe this wondering and wandering will lead me to some place that fits my many definitions and grows up and around me perfectly, leaving me with a solid sense of place and purpose.
But for now, this Thanksgiving I will be thankful for even being blessed enough to have this many interpretations of home, to have experienced so many wonderful places and people that my heart simply cannot make up its mind.
Mimi’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at m.montgomery@cavalierdaily.com.
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