On home

Moving into my dorm room freshman year, an exceedingly large and overwhelmingly empty double in Wilson, I remember someone—an RA, a FAC or maybe my dad—telling me “welcome home.” And I remember glancing around at the eclectic furniture around me, my family who would soon leave to drive back north to what I had always considered home, and the empty bed that would soon house a girl I had never met, and I wondered what my new home would look like.

How would I make these bare bones into a place worthy of such a title?

As a graduating senior, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my past four years in the gothic wonderland. Mostly because, frankly, everyone is chockfull of sap these days, and you can’t make it to this point—late April and bogged down in final papers and preparations for LDOC—without all the reminiscing. So in light of the sap, I’ve started thinking about what going home really means.

Transitioning to a new place and moving away for the first time are tough. Mom is far away, and the culture, the food—looking at you, Marketplace—and the people are all different. And oftentimes, it doesn’t feel quite as warm and welcoming and easy as the place we left behind.

But it gets easier. Because eventually we learn that home isn’t really a single location. When the calendar shifts, spring’s influx of inchworms vanish with the summer humidity and people ask if you’re going home for the summer. Sure I am. But, so too do I go home as August rolls around and the new school year starts.

In my 4 years here at Duke, home has come to refer to a lot of different places: my house off-campus, my family’s house back in Connecticut, my little apartment in Paris, a tiny room tucked away in the medina of Rabat, an equally tiny dorm in Edens and that second floor room in Wilson.

But I’ll say that, at risk of sounding like one of those graduating seniors full of sap, home was never just a dorm, a house, an apartment or any single location.

I was lucky. Wilson became home quickly, and really, I never left it. I live with, hang out with, spring break with, Myrtle with, laugh with and laugh at the same people that I so awkwardly met those first few days as a freshman. Home was and is the people I share it with.

So to my fellow seniors, I remind you that while we can be sad to leave behind all these little slices of home we’ve created here, we have many more cities to explore, worlds to open and homes to create. Home is not stationary. As our classmates scatter, so too do the possibilities. My roommate put up with me for four years of college, and I’ll be damned if she doesn’t have a spot on the floor of her cardboard box in Manhattan for me. Home is where we find each other.

And to those with a little more time in this gothic wonderland, I encourage you to find your little pieces of home. Let them be scattered, unique, tucked in an unexplored corner of the gardens, sitting on top of your dorm’s bench late into the night, in the car with the windows down on the way for spontaneous Cookout. Wherever you find them, fill them with people. Sprint out into the chilly February air to burn benches and hug strangers. If you’re lucky, years later you’ll be jumping and screaming together, celebrating another championship.

Shout out to each and every one of you who has made this gothic wonderland such a beautifully crazie place to call home. Particularly those of you who taught me what it means in the first place.

Julia Janco is a Trinity senior. This is her last column.