Having a Home

I recently received my housing offer from Princeton, and I was surprised by how big of a moment it really was. Opening the email and getting the floor plan of the apartment my girlfriend and I had been assigned was not some banal moment that I simply passed over. Well, it was at first. It was when I laid down to go to bed that it really started to hit me. I have a home, and its out there waiting for me.

Leaving my apartment in Chicago was a very strange, melancholic moment in which each room being emptied of our possessions recalled the wonderful moments we had had in living there. The apartment went from being lived in and warm to being an exposed skeleton that only spoke in faint whispers. It was strange, to say the least. But maybe that’s because I’m overly sentimental. In any event, my girlfriend and I became provincial Chicagoans for a while. We were sleeping in someone else’s apartment for a while (on a mattress on the floor) and we were just running down the clock. You see, my graduation meant leaving the only home we had ever had together. The city and our apartment was where we met, fell in love, made a home, and grew as people. So graduating and moving out really took away an implicit part of who we are as people.

Even living back in my home in Algonquin is not a totally grounding experience. Certainly we are loving this summer of no work and all play (and forming really terrible habits along the way) but its still slightly strange. We are occupying old spaces that were suspended in time and sentiment before. I give new life to old streets that still retain their old life every time I pass through them. And all of our possessions remain in boxes in the garage living out their days in an unused silence. Until we heard about our housing decision we were sojourners in a world of the past with no return destination built with permanence.

But there I was, 2 am, lying wide awake and realizing now that there is some home out there waiting to absorb the material aspects of my life. The boxes of unused stuff has a new destination to look forward to, and my life has a new space in which to grow. To some extent Princeton still seems like an abstract place I’m expected to be in by September, but it has become a little less abstract. I am uncertain what direction my life will take out east, but I know that there is some place for me to retreat to, to emerge from,  and to relish in. Well, assuming I get sufficient furniture to do all of that on.