Underline Book Titles and Underline Home

I am a junior in college who calls Rutgers University my home. There’s a reason why I say “Rutgers” and not “New Brunswick” or “New Jersey” or “Third Rock From the Sun,” but slow your roll, I’m getting to that soon.

Also as a junior in college, I am still writing in the notebooks that I first began taking notes in during my freshman year of college. And I have my reasons for keeping these notebooks for so long:

1. I am trying to conserve paper to make myself feel better about helping some aspect of the environment to make up for my pick-up truck guzzling gallons upon gallons of gas.

2. Who knows when I may need to look at these notes again one day to help with a future research paper or project?

3. I’ve kept journals in the back pages of several of my notebooks out of pure boredom during some of my professor’s lectures, and I’m far too nostalgic about these scribbled, little entries to toss them away.

After coming back to my apartment from class the other day, I did my usual routine of stripping off my backpack as quickly as possible and throwing myself onto my un-made bed to get just a brief moment of cozy, eyes-shut relaxation before I had to run to my next class on another campus. In my hasty and far-from-graceful backpack toss, I’d accidentally launched a notebook of mine onto the bed along with myself. It had landed open-faced onto the page of a journal entry that I had written my first semester of my freshman year of college.

The exact date of the entry is December 12, 2012. And, humble-brag, the entry is adorable.

And although the handwriting is the same, the writing itself doesn’t sound like me. The girl who had sat in front of this exact page during her math lecture on that winter day two years ago was indeed me, but a version of me with purplish hair from a red hair dye experiment gone awry. A version of me who was so innocently blushing in denial at her friends remarks of “I think he likes you.” A version of me who was afraid to be seen alone in the dining hall and would only eat with her roommate or any friend from high school for company. And lastly, I noticed that she was a version of me who cursed a lot less than my current self who is under a lot of fucking stress with all of this shit, godDAMMIT.

The entry started off with me stating how obviously bored I was, what I had done that day, where I planned to go that night, but one, single word on the page really caught my attention (well, because I had underlined it). The word was home. I had written, “I miss home.”

And I thought back to what home had been to me in the past. What exactly was I missing when I wrote, “I miss home?”

Home had always been where my family was; It had always been my red house on the corner in Jamesburg, New Jersey. And when I wasn’t at my house, typically I was at school. There, at school, my friends became my family and high school felt like home for four, long years.

Rutgers is like no home I’ve ever had before. My mom and dad aren’t here. My siblings aren’t here. Very few of my high school friends are here and those that are I clung to freshman year because they were comfortable, they felt safe, and I shied away from all but a few new friends I made in my quad dormitory. Looking back, I could punch myself in the face for holding myself back like that. Okay, well, that’s a little overly dramatic and violent. But I would definitely give myself that look that moms tend to give across the dinner table when they’re too far away to pinch you after you’ve said something embarrassing out loud so their steely gaze into your soul, one eyebrow raised, will have to act as punishment.

I say that Rutgers is my home now because that’s the home that I needed to accept. New Brunswick is an area I’ve always been familiar with, that wasn’t the problem. New Jersey isn’t unfamiliar, I’ve always lived here. The problem was resisting change and allowing myself to become wrapped up in nostalgia. That’s not to say I don’t love my high school friends dearly; We have the original connection of home bonding us over pizzerias we all know, teachers we’ve had together, and sleepovers in childhood bedrooms. But I’ve now chosen to grow with them along with college friends, occasionally watching the two worlds overlap as my older friends bond with my newer friends through my own planned get-togethers or by coincidence.

I know some people try to find their home in another, to look into someone else’s eyes and feel at home. I don’t think I’m chick-flick enough for that, not to say I haven’t felt that way before or I’m some kind of special snowflake who “isn’t like those other girls,” but I tend to try and pull back and reground myself outside of others. I’ve learned that I can feel at home in someone’s particular presence and find comfort in them being there, but I can also find that same comfort of home in a song I know by heart or a favorite book for times when I’m alone in an unfamiliar place without another person’s company. Maybe I just find comfort in having that flexibility.

Home will continually change for me, as it does for everyone as our lives bring us to graduation, new jobs, new travel ventures, and eventually families of our own, if we so choose. I guess college was as good a time as any for me to learn that home is wherever you’re happiest and surrounded by people you love, whether that be family, friends, both, or even by yourself if that’s when you’re most contented.

The girl from freshman year with the flower doodles around the punch holes in the margins of her notebook still exists, she’s still me. And I still doodle like that and I still write entries in the backs of my notebooks, but the entries are less worrisome now. Of all the things I have yet to figure out, at least I know I’m home.

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