On Transition

This was a momentous weekend for me. Friday night at around 8:45 pm I began an overnight trek to New Jersey (with a stop in PA to pick up my girlfriend), so that I could move into my home for the next several months and begin my graduate studies. Having my mother and girlfriend there was fun and it helped bring even the briefest aura of familiarity to the unfamiliar surroundings. But of course, they had many miles to go to their homes, and so we had only unloaded my things, made a run to the grocery store and tried to bring a little order to my campus apartment before they had to be on the road. The hurriedness of the situation made the goodbyes more like ripping off a bad-aid than a torturous event. As the van pulled away, I went up to my new room, found places for a few more of my belongings, and collapsed into bed for a much needed nap.

I woke up an hour later feeling very strange. I felt better rested, which was a good thing, but I also felt incredibly isolated. This will be my first time entering a new surrounding without knowing a single person. I went to a local college with a sizable number of people I already knew and spent my first year there living with one of my best friends. I travelled all the way to Oxford for a semester, but so did another of my good friends, so even thousands of miles away from my home, I was still not entirely on my own. But here I am in New Jersey--a place I never expected to find myself living--and I don’t know a soul. Now, thanks to the internet and cell-phones, it is relatively easy to keep in touch with people, but I can still feel the distance. It may sound a bit far-out, but there is something about a person’s presence that can be felt, and I miss the presence of people that I love, many of whom I do not know when I will see again.

I have written here before of how my idea of home changed dramatically the semester I lived in Oxford. I found home there, and I fell in love with that place and some of the people there, and I suddenly felt myself an alien. I no longer belonged wholly to one place and felt as though I must not belong to either. Through the process of that revelation and ensuing time, my view has matured somewhat. Rather, my notion of home has changed and can now accommodate what I felt. Home is something bigger for me than just one place. It is something less tangible or definable. It has more to do with getting to know people and places, with familiar sights, with habits, and with love and trust. I believe I can find home here, like I found it in Oxford. I know I will meet people and make friends here, but at the outset, it is a fairly alarming feeling of loneliness.