On Being Home

“And at the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back–but that you can’t go home again.”
-Thomas Wolfe, emphasis added

As we both were mulling over making our separate ways home, a friend of mine mentioned this quote. We were both in the midst of spending significant periods of time abroad just after college. Most of our friends, hers in Indiana and mine in Minneapolis, had begun their post-undergraduate life already – which in today’s America usually means taking on monotonous, poorly paid jobs having nothing to do with one’s field of study in order to pay off crippling student loans.  We were both incredibly fortunate. A combination of scholarships and family assistance made it feasible to graduate without any debt, freeing us to take to the globe.

We talked over how we knew that things had changed in our absence. The college social life for which we were nostalgic had ceased to exist. Friends were working (usually more than) full-time, getting married, even having babies! After together roundly bashing the absurdity of a 22 year-old couple getting married, let alone having a child, she sighed and made mention of Mr. Wolfe’s famous words.

Now, after being home for five months of Minnesota’s wintry tundra, dashed expectations of a job floating ever so daintily onto my lap, re-acquainting myself with friends who seem to have changed in every possible way and yet not at all, and many, many plans made, doubted, changed, scrapped, and remade, I’ve learned it is quite true that I cannot go ‘home’ as I remember it. Nor can I go back to Damascus as I remember it. I may, however, go back to a place I once knew and, by throwing off nostalgic expectations, accepting things and people as they are, and working with what I have to make my world a better place, make it home again.

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