Homecoming

Instinctively, I retreated to my room. It wasn't really my room—just the place where piles of not-yet-ready-to-discard possessions accumulated, a dumping ground in a house I only visited. Getting from the door to my bed was like playing a game of Minesweeper. Several thousand dollars' worth of science textbooks lined my desk, and MCAT and USMLE test prep materials intermingled in boxes on the floor. Photos from my older brother's graduation and my senior prom flanked my favorite non-fiction from Atul Gawande and Sudhir Venkatesh, and a couple of Khaled Hosseini's books sat quietly between my high school and college yearbooks and now-obsolete cassette tapes. Mousey, my creatively-named favorite stuffed animal from when I was a kid, leaned against the Macintosh Performa 550 I got in middle school, and red, white and blue pennants from the Red Sox's 2004 and 2007 World Series victories (I still need to buy one for 2013) cozied up against framed and unframed diplomas that, like my personal bookstore, represented years of over-education. It was like a three-dimensional scrapbook of the last 18 years, dislocated in place and time. Early in my sophomore year of college, my mother purchased the house, giving me barely enough time to say goodbye to my childhood home over the Fall break. This was home now, but it wasn’t.

I sat on my bed, clicking the keys on my laptop in a thousand false starts to this, my final column for The Chronicle in my final semester of graduate school. “The War on Thanksgivukkah” was going to be a satirical piece about the uniqueness of this combination of celebrations—one, according to Chabad, that would not occur again for tens of thousands of years—and how Black Friday’s ever-earlier sales seemed to blunt the holidays’ significance. But after typing “hashtag Darwin” in response to a smattering of Facebook repostings of sales-related scuffles at Walmart, I realized I didn’t have Jonathan Swift’s wit. “To kill a virgin” was inspired by my efforts to talk an acquaintance out of hiring a prostitute to help him lose his virginity. A more benign approach might have been simply to talk about first times, something that seemed appropriately sentimental at the end of the semester, before the holidays. I couldn’t shake the would-be references to religion, though (the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene provided a fitting parallel), and to avoid inadvertently alienating my readership through allusion, I tabled the idea. My words were vagabonds, and my ideas were homeless, yet to find their place in this world. My muse inspired me, but my story remained out of reach.

I thought about North Carolina. "You can never go home again," writer Ella Winter once told playwright Thomas Wolfe (a Carolina graduate). The line had inspired him to pen a story by the same name, one of its main themes being that though you may return from away, life has gone on without you, and things just aren’t the same. It was a depressing message, but throughout the long holiday weekend, between bites of pumpkin-related foodstuffs, I wondered how many back-from-college students felt the same inner conflict. My nearly two years away should have given me plenty to catch up on, but I felt strangely out of place, a visitor in my hometown and in my mother’s house. Having lived—independently—in five different cities since high school, the slow process of breaking ties with my roots had come to bear a strange, empty fruit. “Home” was no longer my home. My small family was there, but the happiness I felt was in seeing them, not in returning to New England.

Reflecting on my two only-imagined articles, it was clear to me that I was nonetheless mulling over the notions of family tradition, whether gathered around a menorah or a shopping cart, and haunted by the milestones of growing up, first counseling on the birds and the bees or welcoming a newborn into the world. In trying to make sense of my philosophical crisis (I wasn’t sure if I was pondering questions of existentialism, metaphysics or simply contending with writer’s block), I mentioned the subject of this column to someone in cyber-conversation. His response was disappointing: “Old friends, old smells, bad memories, good memories. What is ‘home’? Blah, blah.” It seemed so trivial to have my deeply personal journey reduced to a text message summary. I stayed up the rest of the night, thinking. At sunrise, tracing my index finger in the condensation on a window pane, I realized I had neglected part of the equation: Though everyone still went about their daily routine once I left, I did the same in my new home. Preoccupied with the changes in my own life, I didn’t notice the progression of time until I saw this Yuletide snapshot. Coming home for the holidays was a subtle reminder that it’s not just our home that has changed, but us, too, while we were away. It’s a mirror telling you that you’re different now. It’s a jarring revelation, but the only way to ground yourself again is, truly, through reflection. Where I sleep at night may have changed, but when I close my eyes, my memories bring me back. I had finally come to understand the old cliché, “home is where the heart is.”