HOME—by any other name
I have never been homesick.
I spent my entire life in one house in the suburbs of Ottawa. Learning to bike on the same road where I learnt to drive. Enclosed by the same walls I scribbled over as a child. I never got the chance to tour UofT before I planted myself in residence, and started growing roots in a new city I would soon call home.
Home, by any other name, has traveled with me over the years. From some of my earliest memories, it was updating my mom about the complications of preschool life. Like when my first girlfriend refused my marriage proposal by the swingset, “She dumped me out! She dumped me out like a bucket of sand!” I exclaimed as my mother tightly gripped the steering wheel so as not to laugh. I remember that car, a cool blue Toyota made decades before I was born. Climbing into the velvety backseat, rolling the windows down by hand crank. I remember sharing every detail of my day, then singing along to Bon Jovi as the 5 o’clock sunset cascaded warmth across our faces.
When I got to elementary school, home was the grassy schoolyard where I dreamt up fantastical worlds of magic to explore with my friends. It was the corner of the yard where the young students excavated rocks, and traded them like precious minerals. In the fall, it was helping my dad rake up leaves just to have piles for my sister and me to jump in. In the dead of winter, it was getting dared to lick a frozen fence, and doing it, no matter the consequences.
Ever since we got our dog, home has been her little barks when she doesn’t want to wait for you to finish getting through the door. It’s laying with her in the sun until her tongue can’t keep panting. It’s sitting with her as she looks out the window, enjoying all the small changes as the world goes by.
When I moved up to high school, home became the drama room. Where the teacher would open his doors at lunch so we could all hang out under the multicoloured lights, playing music over theatre speakers, and rehearse monologues on stage. Home was the stage. It was trying on characters, pushing through emotions I hadn’t worked out just yet, teamwork to create a world we’d invite others to fall into.
And when the cancer came, home became the hospital bed where I cracked jokes with my nurses. It was the waiting room where I sat ahead of my Christmas Eve chemo, dressed in a reindeer onesie, as a mother came in holding her son’s tired hand and said, “See, it’s okay to wear your pajamas to the hospital, the big kids do it too.” And when things went wrong, and my day trips extended throughout the week, home became the reclining chair my parents would take turns in, sleeping by my side.
Moving from one isolation to another, home was the forest paths where I’d escape from the walls of pandemic lockdown. It was debates over dinner arising from the nightly news broadcast. Increasingly so, it was chuckles over text, smiles over video calls, and eyes from a distance.
When I came to Vic, home became The Cat’s Eye. It grew from a place of wonder with ceilings of string lights to a hideaway for late-night conversations that bled into sunrise. It was playing new music, walking on a new stage, and building new worlds. It’s the fast food-fueled debriefs after a night out. It’s the friend who creeps into your dorm room to watch Succession when it feels like your life’s falling apart. It’s the matching bracelets you get in hopes of preventing such a travesty again. It’s convincing friends to run into the quad in the middle of the night to build our first snowman of the year. Home has been every cafe where you promised to work but ended up gossiping. It’s each piece of lore shared, each question answered, each walk back to your building. “Text when you’re home safe!”
I hope as time creeps on, and I see this university as I view my high school now, that I will continue to find new homes and forge them for others.
