this space is strange, and i am the stranger.

I boarded the plane to Idaho listening to jazz and returned listening to Phoebe Bridgers. A progression led by the realization that "home" felt different this time around. It was a feeling that the works of Etta James or Louis Armstrong could not speak to. No, for this, I needed the sounds of Phoebe crying "the end is here" to pair with the internalization that the end of "home" as I once knew it really was here.

Over the past two years, I’ve had a complicated perception of what home means. How I want to call the rolling hills of the place I spent my childhood that very word, but my family no longer lives there. How I want to call home the valley in which my family moved, but I feel like a visitor more often than not. How I have grown to call Boston home now, as it is the closest thing I have right now to a feeling of being at ease, yet this feels like a dismissal to all that I once knew “home” to be.

Home to me is confusing, a word I use sparingly to describe the state I grew up in. Recently, the word "Idaho" has become the umbrella term that encapsulates the people I love spread hundreds of miles apart and the places I used to frequent. It's not "I'm going home to see family" anymore, it's "I'm going to Idaho to see family."  

It's hard to describe the complexities of where "home" resides when my family has moved away from all that I once knew. How when I go "home for the holidays" it's no longer to the town where the familiar faces reside. now, it's to a space where the only people I know are my family, where the landscape is strange.

When our house in my hometown sold, I felt nothing. I was living 3,000 miles away, and the physical distance was enough to make me numb. my mom sent pictures of the empty house the day she moved, and I congratulated her, encouraging her how this next chapter was exactly what we all needed to move on from the monotony of our hometown. 

Slowly the numbness faded, making space for the roller coaster of emotions one might feel when their comfort blanket is stripped away.

Fear hit first: what if I needed to go home? I felt so sure about moving 3,000 miles away because of the solid foundation I knew existed in that small town. What would happen if I wanted to bring a friend or romantic partner to visit my hometown one day? I grew sad that they wouldn't get to see that home where I spent my teenage years, how they wouldn't come to know the local coffee shop as I did, and how I feared I wouldn't get to know these things again.

Then nostalgia struck. the realization that I would never know that town again like I did when we owned a home there. How the trees look when spring begins to bloom, or the way the sun reflects on the snow-covered mountains. How I would not run the back roads followed by a yoga session in the basement of that big gray house. How I would not drive down Main Street listening to music from the local hometown musicians. How I wouldn't spend my paychecks at the restaurant I was once a waitress at or at the chic consignment shop I once spent hours perusing. How holidays have now become more complicated, having my family spread across the surprisingly vast state. But mostly, it was how I didn't get to say goodbye, and suddenly I was hurt.

Hurt, because when I visited last, it was Christmas of 2021, and I left thinking I would be back again. I thought I had more time to love that hometown the way I once did. 

I fought with myself over this – telling myself that people's families move all the time and that I am not special. Telling myself, also, that it is unfair that home feels complicated, how it is no longer tied up in a nice bow for me to return to every Christmas. For every thought I had of sadness, I tried to counteract it with the opportunities that lay ahead: "Think about how nice it will be to explore a new town in Idaho, to let go of the heartbreaks and hardships that your hometown once held." All of this effort to "be positive" only to find that attempting to put a bandaid of positivity over my sadness only led to a deeper feeling of irritability. 

I often compare my emotional experience to that of a guesthouse (inspired mostly by the poem, "Guesthouse" by Rumi). I imagine each emotion to be a visitor, and my mindset is the home. I imagine each emotion to be knocking on my door, and I have the ability to welcome them in or kindly suggest they carry on. The catch, however, is that I have to at least greet each emotion, it would be rude, after all, to slam the door in their face or ignore them altogether.

Sadness was the visitor that would not leave, and I was forced to welcome it into my home, maybe, I thought, there was something to be learned from this emotion that wouldn't leave.

I let myself be sad, very sad. To mourn the ways of life in that little town, to accept the fact that I am allowed to miss something that doesn't exist anymore. I let myself grieve for the parts of my life that can't possibly exist anymore, for wanting something back yet knowing it will never be the same again. I wrote myself a permission slip to be sad, and only then did I begin to let it go. I began to perceive this all as meaningful. I was deeply ready to let go of all that my hometown reminded me of, and my house selling was the last thing to do before turning the page. 

The page that would allow space for this new chapter, where I live a wildly enchanting life in Boston, yet a reality that means "home" as I always knew it is gone. A chapter where holidays suddenly mean having to carve out time for road trips across the state when I am only home for so long. How time with people I love is short, very short. How the place where I lay my head to rest at night when visiting for the holidays is not the space I once called home. 

That place during the holidays is now the guest bedroom of my mother's new beautiful home. It's larger than my studio apartment that I have back in the city, and my little sister has decorated it with her love for interior design. 

It is a shared space in a foreign place, a reminder that I do not live here and this town, this room, is not the one I grew up in. It is a space whose name suggests the temporary nature of it all: the guest bedroom. A space that had someone else sleeping there the night I left, and the realization that I am simply a guest settled in. This house is foreign to me, the bed I once called mine belongs now to the guests that come and go. My old things fill the room, but the space is strange, and I am the stranger.

____________

I found myself feeling tender in Idaho this time around, wrapping my head around where home is now, realizing that when I return to Idaho, it is only as a guest. I had lost my sense of what “home” meant anymore, only to have found it when I returned to Boston.

I realize now that I am in the place where I most closely resonate with the word home — to the place I know strongest to be my peace place. Home, I've realized is a place where I am so Camille, where my days feel beautiful. a place where I light up inside, where I let out sighs of relief and gratitude. It is a place that is aligned with who I've known myself to be all along because while my "hometown" is nostalgic, I know it was not designed for me. Home has changed because I have changed, and home, I think, is wherever you feel most alive. For me, I feel alive here, on the dreamboat of the east coast.

xoxo,

Camille