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| Miranda Mason Class of 2019 |
“Home. Let me come home. Home is wherever I’m with you.” These words begin one of my favorite songs, “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. These words have seemed odd in my mouth since coming to the University of Louisville, a place very different from that which I’ve called home for the past near nineteen years of my life. I’ve come to face a difficult question, which I’m sure many college freshmen, and many people in general, find themselves asking: Where is home?
I caught myself the other day, walking back to Threlkeld Hall, saying to a friend, “I’m headed home for the day.” I didn’t mean my family’s double-wide in Owen County, Kentucky; I meant that little, messy dorm room with communal bathrooms and an overly zealous air conditioner which I share with a roommate who is even further from her hometown than I am from mine. Instantly, I realized the meaning of the words which had rolled off of my tongue. I had called this place home. This place, so full of strangers and homework and so lacking in familial connections and home cooked meals, where I sit under my lofted bed at my cramped desk writing this blog, I had called home.
I instantly felt as though I had betrayed my home “back home”. It seemed to be a slap in the faces of my mom and dad and little sister and all the rest of my beloved family. It was as though I was dismissing all of the best friends I have there and all we’ve been through. All of the people who made me who I am, and who aren’t here, came flooding to me and I felt as though I had abandoned them by coming here. Perhaps this is an extreme way to react to using a word, but sometimes a single word can weigh on one’s soul, and this one did just that to me.
I do love the place I come from. The countryside is beautiful, full of rolling hills and gorgeous trees and wildlife that goes far beyond the city’s squirrels. The town where I went to school is small, which can be both good and bad, but I find that looking back I wouldn’t have gone anywhere else if given the choice. I knew the people in my community, and they knew me. My teachers not only knew my name, but about my personality and life; they were personally invested in me. They became friends just as much as instructors to me, and gave me hope that I could become everything that I dreamed of becoming. I couldn’t be here without them. My friends were constant, funny, wonderful people who I could count on to be there for me no matter what. They taught me to be kind and brave and loyal. My family has been loving and supportive even when my dreams differ from their own. They have given me everything they have to offer, and I can’t describe how thankful I am for that. I love and miss all of those people so much, but back home in Owen County, though I was happy, I wasn’t satisfied.
That is why I came to U of L. Higher education has always been a part of my plan. To be able to grow and change the world around me through my education has been the goal. I didn’t intend to gain a new home. I already had a home. Yet, here I am, in a new place, with new people- a new world, and I love it. There are so many interesting people to meet, and many of them have become my friends. They’re certainly different from my old ones, but in many ways the same. They are kind and funny and always there for me, and heaven only knows what lessons they will bring me. There are new things to do here with these new people. I’ve learned to dance, and tried new food, and seen amazing things in the city. I’ve joined organizations on campus that allow me to try my hand at a variety of tasks, and I’ve learned so much. I’m very happy. Sure, one can only eat so much at the Ville Grill and stay up only so late doing homework before exhaustion kicks in, but I’m learning that that’s the “college experience” kicking in, and I even enjoy that. I feel that I’ve found my niche, a place where I can make my own decisions, my own mistakes even, and live them out. There are new people in my life, crazy enough to want to live those decisions out with me, and I’m so glad of that. I love these people and the experiences with them that have made this place home.
But here’s the real trouble: these feel like noncontiguous worlds. There is the world of College, and the world of All Before it. Both I’ve called home, and both contain people whom I care for deeply, but they don’t overlap, except for me. I’ve had several experiences that illustrate this. When my family members come to visit on occasion, they seem completely out of place despite the fact that I want them to feel at home where I do. When I try to explain jokes and situations from college to outsiders, they don’t understand. When I try to explain outside situations and jokes, my college friends don’t quite understand either. It feels like I’m constantly saying, “Well, you had to be there to understand.”
One of the most heart-breaking moments I’ve had was one night when I was on the phone with some friends from the world of All Before who go to a different college and who have had a very different experience from me. I was so excited to hear their voices and tell them about everything I’d done here, but unfortunately the call went downhill. I was telling them about my new friends and opportunities and thoughts and feelings, and then was asking about theirs. They didn’t seem nearly as happy as I. In fact, they seemed upset, as though because I didn’t call often I didn’t care about them. Nothing could be further from true, but what one of them said stuck in my brain, “Miranda, you’ve changed so much.” I found myself crying, afraid I’d let down the people I love. Had I changed? When I went back to All Before for a weekend, it felt strange but familiar, and I quickly rediscovered my niche there, a different one from the one at College, but one I could fill all the same. However, while I was finally back in one home I’d been missing, I was now missing the other. I’d never wanted so badly to be in two places at once. I began wondering, could I really have more than one true home?
When I sat down to write this blog entry, I sat down with the hope of reconciling my feelings of home. If Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros say, “Home is wherever I’m with you,” who is “you”? In context of the song, “you” is a love interest, but who is my “you”? Who really has my love? Is it my family or old friends or new friends or a significant other or maybe something else? When people say, “home is where the heart is,” do they take into consideration that a heart may be in many places at once? Mine is, and so I have to think of home as more than a place. Home is not that double-wide or this dorm. Home is a feeling. It is making up with my All Before best friends on the phone before going out on the town with my College best friends, and home is keeping them all dear to my heart. Home is going to see family for the weekend, introducing them to my college boyfriend, and hoping the two love each other as much as they love me. Home is the feeling I get when someone asks where my favorite place in the world is and my eyes tear up as I try to describe the road I grew up on; and it is the feeling I get as my roommate comes over to hug me because she notices the tears. Home is a feeling of love. It is where memories of the people I love are made.
By this standard, I’m almost always at home. It may be hard to see it, but by leaving my comfort zone in the world of All Before, I found, not a noncontiguous collection of homes, but an expansion of the one I already had. If home can be likened to a house, coming to Louisville has been a huge addition to my home. That doesn’t mean I love the original part of the house any less, but it does mean I have more room to live happily in. Perhaps I have changed, but not by getting rid of the old me. I’ve torn down a few walls so I can make my heart and mind bigger, and that has allowed more people into my life whom I love. I don’t have to say goodbye to All Before; this house still stands. I want to invest in adding College, and eventually more of the world to it, because home doesn’t have to be a small place. It should just keep getting bigger, because home is where the love is.
Miranda Mason is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She studies chemistry and political science.