I am homesick today.
It caught me in the shower; the vague blueness that had floated in my head since I woke deepened into an acute sense of loneliness, of alienation, of loss. Homesickness does that to me. One moment I sit calmly in PreCalc Tops, and the next I am paralyzed by the memory of crouching six years old in our backyard, sculpting tea cups out of earthy clay. Standing by the salad bar in the PFM, I am ambushed by the way my record player wafts Don McLean through my room at home in the middle of the night. I can see the stars from my room at home.
This is normal, I know. Almost all NCSSM juniors go through weeks and months of longing for the simpler lives we left behind. In fact, I believe I have adjusted far more easily than most of my classmates. But what it takes me a moment to notice, when I sink into my memories and try to label them homesickness, is that the clay I played in was red Virginia clay. I could find it in abundance ten years ago, when my family lived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but there is none within a hundred miles of my house now. The room I think of as my own, in the brown-brick house in New Bern, has belonged to another family since August 10th, 2005 — two months and thirteen days, give or take a few. Perhaps their ten-year-old daughter lives there now, or perhaps they’ve made it a den for the family in general, but it is not my room anymore. My room, as I must keep reminding myself, is what was built as the maid’s quarters in our new house on Camp Lejeune. I chose it because it is private, has its own bathroom, and can be turned into a guest room while I’m away. We moved in on August 6th, exactly two weeks before I left for school. There are no posters on the walls, and I can’t find anything I’m looking for. My record player and all my records are still among the missing. Whenever I see the room — indeed, the whole house — the main thing that strikes me is the realization that it isn’t mine. This place where my family lives is not home. So of course I wonder, Where is my home? I am frightened when I realize that I don’t know.
Among my earliest memories is one of a move. I am not quite five, sitting in my carseat in the back of a gray van in mid-November. I am staring out my window at the town flashing by, and everything is strange to me. I do not remember feeling any emotion other than a hollowness foreign to my four-year-old self. That was our move to Charlottesville, the first of six that I can recall. The four years we spent there represent the longest I have ever lived in one place. My father is a Marine, you see, so three years on one base is a treat. Beginning with fifth grade, I attended five schools in five years. Sophomore year was a shock to me; not since I was ten had I been able to return to the same classrooms and teachers and library books I had gotten used to the year before.
Therefore, the transition to NCSSM was familiar to me in certain ways. I knew how to deal with new teachers and classmates, how to assimilate into a different curriculum, how to learn my way around somewhere new. In my mind, I had already separated myself from my most recent set of friends and acquaintances; the missing them was dying down. I had gone through the ritual of moving, which takes me from Christmas to June: the withdrawal from one life and the preparation for something new. I had entered so deeply into my independence that I did not even miss my family at first. Oddly, I feel their absence more now, two months into my time here, than I did on that first frightening day. My family is and will always be a large portion of my home. Throughout the cycle of loss and growth that moving has created in our lives, they have been my constant. When I was nine or ten, I played a game with myself: every time I visited a friend, I compared my family to hers, weighing the costs and benefits of living a different life. Without exception, my family always won. I am extremely lucky. My parents love me and each other; they have created a household in which discipline and high standards are mixed with culture and silliness. Even when I fight with them, even when I am punished, something under the mammering voice of outrage in my mind knows that the discord is essentially alright because we will, without question, eventually make peace. I trust them. I am part of them and they are part of me.
And now when I speak to them, I notice that they are changing — or perhaps I am. We all are, I suppose. Change is constant, and I would not notice it if I were with them, but I am not. Suddenly, instead of changing in rhythm, like interweaving lines in some odd piece of music, we are changing in different directions. I wasn’t there when my brother got his electric guitar, and he hasn’t read the article I wrote for the Stentorian. He doesn’t even know what the Stentorian is. Without more than a year’s notice — I had barely heard of NCSSM until last fall — I have been severed from the day-to-day life of the four people who come closest to understanding who I am. I am of course still part of the family, but nothing is the same. Last week in Chemistry, it occurred to me out of nowhere that I will never, never go back to the daily routines that still seem close enough to touch. I will never ride a bus to my house again after school and find my mother in the kitchen making pie. I was stunned to realize that I am perilously close to becoming what I still call a “grown-up.” I’m not at all sure I want to be a grown-up. I still sleep with Sarah and Lukie, the doll and bear I was given at my christening. I like watching Disney movies with the children I baby-sit. What business have I in turning seventeen? Never is a very long time.
I felt this change coming long before NCSSM. Adolescence happens to everyone, and for me it has always carried a sense of nostalgia for aspects of childhood I can never manage to name. I heard a song floating out of my smallest brother’s room once at his bedtime, a song we had played on long car trips when I was very young. I sat down on the carpet outside and listened to the whole thing, staring blindly at the bottom of his door. When did I last hear that song? Am I the same person I was when I was four or six or eight? I have changed. Are the changes bad or good?
Or perhaps I am not so different after all. I knew the song, and it was still beautiful to me. I could still finger the layers of mystery and meaning it had held for me ten years in the past. It still made me dream. My mind is my home, I think. It holds my memories and my thoughts, my loves and my shames, my hopes and my fears. When I wish for something new, when I shed myself while writing, when my own thoughts make me laugh, I am home.
My mother called yesterday.
“We found your record player,” she said. “It was in a box in the garage. Go figure. We’ll bring it up on Saturday.”
“Great,” I told her. “See you then.”