Everyone has been there.

Everyone has been in his or her bedroom, alone. I am no stranger to this, nor would I pretend to be, even if I could. There are times that I have felt it in the cold midnight rain of May. Times, too, during the long solitude of the hot evening dusk or during a late-breaking June dawn.

I have been so during the hectic anticipation of September – with the giddy, laughing sounds of campus house parties spilling onto lawns and streets – and so in the uncertainty of another year drawing to a close.

Not all years go out with the crazy bang that I wish for, that sense of legitimation. In a time of transition, even entire years can come to a calm close, an anticlimax that does not seem to do the last twelve months the justice I feel they deserve.

Time is a fickle thing in years like these. I could look back and count a thousand memories – of concerts and house parties and long evenings that I cannot remember the ends to. I have enough memoirs in three years to last a full lifetime.

Most do. It is a busy life, the college life. But even so, it is spun into time that flies by most times without notice, without the consciousness or the realization that months can pass like days and days like echo, floating into a haze that is neither vacant nor sectioned the way life can be sectioned into discernable parts.

It is not purely nostalgia that I feel, because the times that I long for continue to pass by me with every step into every wild 14th Avenue night, every early morning spent laughing about the night before and every still afternoon reflection in between.

It is, at times, desperation. I have tried to run this city – from the ubiquitous brick of German Village to the careless, graceful dinge of 13th Avenue house parties. I have driven this city in search of something intangible, the eerie calm heading back north on 4th Street before rush hour, hinging emotion and mood onto the crazed, drunken strip of Front Street on Friday night.

But every time, it is home I come back to.

Not just in the obvious sense that it is where I sleep, where I eat and where my belongings are. It is home in the sense that campus – Columbus even – has finally become a place for solace – for definition – in the stead of Cleveland, the city of my birth.

Though it has not always been so. I have hated my apartment. I have hated the sight of it and the smell – the sinks full of dishes I could not bring myself to wash, the piles of dirty clothes and bags of trash sitting on the floor of my kitchen.

Changing where you call home is a much more difficult thing to do than most will admit. Different scenery, new habits, altered lifestyle – these things come much easier than the real transition that must be made.

A girl in my writing workshop wrote in a personal essay that she surrounded herself with a fake name when she moved to Chicago, to avoid the kind of intimacy that people often fake when they meet others. She said, “When you move, you pack your virtues along with your vices.”

That is smart, I feel, since it is hard to pack those things up and arrange them in similar ways once you move somewhere else. In many ways, I have felt that difference in Columbus. Not that I was a different person, just that the person I am has not always fit the way I expected it to, that I have brought all the same pieces, just that they didn’t always stack up and translate in the same way.

But, in many ways, this year has been different: The last needed success of really translating myself from one place to another. Three years later, I realize I have arranged myself in a way that is not the same, but that difference was what was coming, whether I liked it or not – a new city, a new house, a new context.

I have realized, like many others have before me, that the home is not always a concrete place, that it changes and moves. And I have realized – with my virtues and vices, my loves and hates at least – I have finally found time to unpack.

John Ross is a senior in comparative studies. He can be reached at [email protected].