I have always looked on a bit surprised as those around me triumphantly declare that they are going home over a given weekend. I have never really felt comfortable at home—odd, given that home is supposed to be subjectively defined as where one is most comfortable, safe, familiar. Around these parts, however, home is usually conflated with their parents’/high school town or house. For me, it is neither.
It’s a bit trite, at this point, to bemoan the fact that I am transient, unrooted, a citizen of many worlds and contexts. But it is, to an extent, one of the only ways that I can define myself. This feeling of dislocation is both situational and tactical, however. I was uprooted from my “homy old family house” at an early age, first by a move to Wyoming, then divorce and many subsequent moves to invariably temporary housing arrangements. The constant feeling of being on the move with my mother and brother left me without a sense of stability on the “home” front, and left to find my own niche in less conventional spaces, from diners to concerts and, most frequently, other people’s houses.
There is something much more comforting about someone else’s house. It is both novel and comforting, in that grade school sleepover way; even more so now that we are away, and everyone’s parents tend to be overly nurturing in an attempt to condense their own sense of instability and change into the odd weekend of normalcy when the kids come home. When I go home with friends, my guard comes crashing down. I know, for at least that particular window of time, I will be sheltered, restored to health, and I will allow myself to sleep fully safely. It’s here that I disintegrate and rejuvenate, in the novelty of other people’s guest rooms and kitchens.
In high school, my life was a series of attempts to escape my house, through travel, work, going to other homes. My house was cluttered, anxious. It embodied the stress I felt from my familial disintegration, and put on mental alert, ready to be there for my mother of brother, or manage the next series of stresses. I never slept very easily in my bed. Since then, my mother has remarried, moved to a new city and a new house. I love it there, but I can only think of it as a place where I see my family, slightly out of, but intuitively in, their proper context. They belong there. As for me, that house in Denver retains enough newness and rigidity to feel like a home, but I still cannot bring myself to say I am “going home” for the break.
I am already home in Village C, in Uncommon Grounds, at the 9:30 Club. Out of the frenetic discord of the city, the jarring forward inertia and instability of the college experience, I have been on the move, but finally at home, in my niche. I finally found a place of my own, in the city, where I have set down some roots, but will move again, to 37th St. this May, where, as our senior community re-congeals, I will feel even more myself, adrift in my element.
Spring break, however, presents a problem. This is the time when most people shoot for ultra-rupture in the hedonistic shores of collegespringbreaktravelclich?land (insert preference here), but instead I am taking my girlfriend “home” to meet the family, be tormented by my dog and hopefully not be terrified by this fragile space that is still somewhere betwixt and between for me. Until now, I have not wanted to bring anyone to my family’s house—it’s a whole new array of anxieties, from micromanaging the reactions of friends to my family and vice versa, to realizing just how disjointed and inadequate I feel that I do not have that personal, inviting space that they and their respective families have offered to me over the years. I can only offer that space in my own room here, even if it is a ten-by-fifteen cinderblock monstrosity. My family’s home was always and is, to some extent, still a perpetual culture shock, alarmingly familiar yet still alien, out of my possession.
As I get more comfortable gradually setting down, spaces for myself in D.C., I am realizing the potential for, and the ways in which, I can find home in unexpected locations. A good friend of mine offered the sound travel advice to always make a new space yours, even if only for a day. I’m getting there. So, I am taking her home for the break. In a way, it has become home, not as my atemporal, hermetically-sealed haven, but in the same way that a Monday evening in Teaism, the red line Metro train, or your living room on Friday night has become home: not geographically-stable, but rooted in any space where I am surrounded by friends and unfamiliar couches. In the end, a part of me is still jealous when I see friends zipping home to their refuges in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. I am also at once comforted that I can, somehow, make a home anywhere I find it.
Ian Bourland is a Junior in the School of Foreign Service and associate editor of the Georgetown Voice. He’ll see you in Panama City Beach.
