Longing for a Destination
Originally posted on www.insta-grad.tumblr.com
In college, there was something wonderfully familiar and oddly comforting about going home for the holidays. Like a time-honored ritual, I’d toss my final papers into my professor’s mailboxes, frantically pack up my suitcase with more books than clothes, slush through the snow, (or its remnants), to the train station at the edge of campus, and bleary eyed, step onto a cross-country flight for a long winter’s nap. By a miracle of some Christmas magic I would arrive six hours later in sixty degrees of pure Californian sunshine.
A surge of urgency under laid every movement, every step, every action that would get me away from campus and one step closer to home, where I could gorge myself on home-cooked food, sleep in ‘till noon, and forget for a little while that I had another round of finals waiting for me in January. Like Odysseus on his journey home, I battled every adversary that was thrown my way—missed the shuttle to my train, I took a cab to the station. Flight was cancelled. Got on a two-hour shuttle bus to the closest airport with the next outgoing flight.
I would do anything it took to get back home, not because I hated school, but because I just needed a break and home was the place where I could have one. But this year, I’m not running to catch a train, or getting on a delayed plane. I will not be making the trek from my college campus, because I’m already firmly planted at home.
Since graduation, I’ve been living at home with my mother. My reasons for moving back home were pragmatic—I didn’t come out of college with a job that would pay enough for me to live on my own in a new city. But I had gotten an unpaid summer internship in a producer’s office, a huge opportunity for someone trying to break into the entertainment industry, and my house was located just within reason of a one and a half hour commute.
So I made the choice to come home out of necessity, so that I could take an opportunity that might lead towards professional success and financial independence. That leap is taking longer than I anticipated, but I don’t regret delaying it, just as I don’t miss all the headaches and pitfalls of traveling during the holiday season.
What I do miss about traveling home for the holidays is the feeling of freedom I felt when I stood on the platform and the cold winter air whipped against my face as the train flew by. Even though I knew my destination, I had the sense that this train could connect me to any part of the world if I should choose. Yet at this moment, I feel as if the world is not quite my oyster and my ability to become a pearl within its womb is shrinking rapidly as the places to which I once journeyed become faded memories, disappearing down the track.
