Homeward Bound

I'm going home this weekend to celebrate Easter with family and friends! I have really missed New England, and all week, I've been thinking of places I want to go around my hometown, going to Mass with my nieces and then seeing Jarrod's family for Easter lunch at his grandparents' house. Although I have the specter of two final papers to write hanging over me this weekend, nothing can dampen my spirits. I can't wait to go home.

Home has a more complicated definition for me now, though. I've been in Buffalo for over nine months. While the city itself doesn't exactly feel like home, and can never feel like home the way Marlborough does since it contains my entire childhood, I realized last week just how much my apartment has become home to me. I spent Thursday through Sunday morning in another person's house, pet-sitting, and I was a little surprised to find how much I missed my apartment. Jarrod stayed in the house with me, which made it better, but we both felt displaced. It was more than just not having our things around or not knowing the layout of the house. It just wasn't our home, and I appreciated more deeply that our apartment is our home, not merely a place where we keep our stuff and sleep at night.

When I first moved here, I anticipated feeling the same way towards my apartment as I did towards my college dorm rooms; a place to stay, a space which becomes comfortable and welcoming, but which isn't really a home, just a pseudo-home, a temporary resting place. We will probably have a different apartment next year, somewhere closer to campus so we can save on gas money, so in that sense, it is similar to my college dorms. One year occupancy, then move on to another place. But this little second-floor, one-bedroom apartment feels more mine than my dorm rooms ever did, and I can't quite explain why. I do know, however, that spaces become meaningful because of the people that animate them, the memories that linger and follow you.

Memory absolutely fascinates me; I write and read a lot about nostalgia, perhaps because I'm very prone to this emotion. I'm interested in the ability to move yourself back in time emotionally, but only in part, returning to the same place and mental state, yet impossibly remote from it. Tonight I'll probably share my room with my sister for the first time since she got married six years ago. It will be a lot of fun and we'll probably stay up way too late, laughing and talking like we always have. But we're such vastly different people from who we were the last time we shared a room. There's something beautiful and sad and joyous in that, all at once.