Over the past two years at university, I have had friends and family message me to ask, ‘When are you coming home?’ I always catch myself pausing before I reply, because my immediate thought is: ‘But what do you mean? I am home.’
The look on your parents’ faces when you first call university ‘home’ is a massive punch to the stomach. It is the moment they realise that, somewhere in between moving into accommodation, learning how to cook for yourself, and making friends who were once strangers, this unfamiliar place has become familiar and comfortable. You have learnt to live independently. You have built your own routines, memories, and relationships. And somewhere along the way, you have created a home.
For me, I have learnt that home is not a predetermined location. It is a space we create through the people, experiences, and memories that fill up a certain place. We all grow up in places which our families have learnt to love and build their own homes, and in turn, those places become our homes too. But leaving allows us to discover that home is not something we simply inherit. We can create it for ourselves.
University is a strange kind of purgatory: a period of existence somewhere between the home you came from and a future you have not yet decided on, but you have the freedom to do absolutely anything, the world is your oyster. From the beginning of university, you know there is a time limit. You move into a house knowing that in two or three years, you will most likely be packing everything back into boxes. You meet people knowing that everyone will eventually scatter in different directions. But at this brief moment in time, you are all on the same journey.
Despite knowing something is temporary, it does not make it feel any less real.
Additionally, being away from home gives you a newfound sense of freedom. If you fancy a day trip to a neighbouring town, you can just buy a ticket. You can go on exciting trips, even visiting your flatmates' hometowns. I genuinely think I have travelled to more cities and countries in the last two years, and seen more of the UK, than I had in my entire life before university. Now, one of my favourite places is my flatmate’s house. Not simply because of its location, but because of the memories I associate with it and, admittedly, because his cat loves me more than my own does. A place that once meant nothing to me has become somewhere I am excited to return to. It has become one of the many places I can think of as a home.
The movement of university is not only physical. Likewise, home is not a physical location. While we travel between cities, our bodies and minds are taking their own journeys, navigating new challenges. I can now confidently tell the difference between a power cut and a dropped fuse. I have conversations with my flatmate discussing whose turn it is to buy washing-up liquid. I have learnt the strange satisfaction of buying homeware because I like it, rather than someone else choosing it for me. Joint food shops, once an activity I would have immediately declined if my mum had asked me to come along, have somehow become fun.
These things sound insignificant, but they aren’t really.
They are tiny activities through which your independence becomes ordinary. You stop thinking about the fact you are living away from home and simply start living. While building a routine, you have started building a life without even realising. But eventually you leave this space too.
Returning home during the holidays is supposed to feel familiar, and in many ways it does. You know where everything is and yet something feels different. Perhaps that is the strangest part of leaving: you can return to exactly the same place without ever being able to return as the same person.
University teaches us to move constantly, between cities, friendships, identities, and versions of ourselves. We leave home and create another, despite eventually leaving that one too. But perhaps that is not a failure of permanence. And this is where we can say that home is not supposed to be a single, fixed destination.
Perhaps this is what excites me most, knowing that this will not be the last place I learn to call home. There will be new cities, new houses, new people, and new routines. There will be places I cannot yet picture becoming familiar, but I will learn all my favourite spots without realising, even new people whose homes will become places I return to. I am looking forward to seeing all the different places I will learn to call home, even if I do not know where they are yet.
So now, when people ask me when I’m coming home, I do pause. I will give them a date, but I know that is not the only place I consider home anymore. I may be returning to a place full of familiarity, but I am not returning as the same person.
