What is Home?

I’m at the airport right now waiting for my plane to board and to leave Silicon Valley for the next sixth months. With a week and a day not in classes total in that time, I will have effectively lived a combined nine months at college, lived nine months in Chicago.

When I first came back to where I lived the first eighteen years of my life for Thanksgiving, I wrote about how much home felt familiar but distant. I didn’t quite understand why or how I felt suddenly so detached from a world I thought I was so connected with, even if I may have disliked certain aspects. Coming back for just a few days, I thought I would be able to seemingly predict the type of experience I’d have when I came back for an extended time.

Yet, it wasn’t at all what I had expected, and fortunately, everything I could not have imagined how surprisingly normal it was.

The single thing I missed the most coming back home was just my room. I love my roommate and I love my dorm, but there’s just something about being in a space you’ve grown with and put together for years. It was really relaxing to just be in that space, for an absurd amount of time. This naturally leads to the fact that I was able to consistently get 9–10 hours of sleep for the first time in over three months, which not only rejuvenated me but…