Column: A life without home sweet home
Published Sept. 10, 2010
Here we go. These 600 words go out to the domestically confused.
Two weeks before moving into my first apartment, I moved into my first house. My parents had bought land in a wooded area north of Chicago during my senior year of high school, and they started building their dream home a month before I began my freshman year of college.
During my elementary school days, we were in a constant frenzy of relocation: working fast to make our way northwest into the cozy Chicago suburbs. At any given moment, better, affordable property out west would make us mobilize. The pioneer gypsy pace drove me wild. I never got to stay anywhere long enough to make friends. I never learned to multiply by nine. It didn’t matter: new school, new curriculum, always managing to slide by.
Eventually we did slow down, and we were comfortable in a couple of townhomes. I had four years in one high school complete with a sweetheart, a varsity letter and a peach-pink bedroom. I was settled in, stable. This was home.
My first year of college life could easily be separated into two distinct halves: one part of me remained dedicated to holding down the fort I called home, while the other began formulating a new persona in mid-Missouri.
When I would return to Chicago, I was a diligent friend and daughter. I’d host dinner parties in order to reminisce about the old days. It was sweet and nostalgic. When the time came to go back to school, I’d get so damn sad leaving it all behind again.
But then I’d return to Columbia, switch off my heavy midwestern accent and dive back into business. Within weeks of starting MU, I had snagged myself a new boy, weaseled my way into a stylish group of friends and branded myself with a new and improved hipster image.
I spent a solid year living two exclusive lives. I’d go home and have breakfast with my ex-boyfriend. I’d come back to Columbia and eat dinner with my new beau. Eventually, things got too complicated. I had become a sketchy and debatably evil character. There was no way to fully dedicate myself to anything or anybody. Wherever I went there was guilt, hot and heavy. Whatever I did, somebody somewhere got hurt.
This summer served as a wake-up call. I came back to Chicago ready to turn that life back on—I don’t like to give up on anything. I jumped into plans with high school friends, I reawakened the flames of old passion, but I couldn’t have been less happy.
When I told tales about my college experiences, my girlfriends giggled nervously. The running joke was that I had gone crazy.
I tried to live for two up until the end of July. That was my big move into our first house and my last miserable birthday dinner, where dead friends smiled weakly as I raised my glass and made a false toast. I saw a telephone wire go up in flames on the ride home from dinner that night. I slept well.
Packing and unpacking from dorm to dorm, back home, new home, apartment—my life has been in and out of poorly-labeled boxes. I am in a place in life where “home” is not concrete. I’ve spent more nights in bed on my Columbia futon than I have on my new foam pillow mattress in Chicago.
It’s better to travel lightly when you’re still figuring yourself out. Have experiences, toughen up and become an interesting human being. As long as you can maintain a roof over your head, that doormat sentimentality will happen someday.
I’ll be home when I’m 35, staring into the Pacific from my trendy porch loft in Seattle and drinking French-pressed coffee. I can hear the radio blaring NPR. My husband wears good cologne.