Home isn’t exclusively the tiny apartment where my things sit in boxes, or the freshman dorm where I used to sleep, or the blue house in rural Ontario that I visit on holidays. I belonged to each of those places once, but they don’t have exclusive claim anymore.

So I think broader, and I think that maybe home can be entire cities. Maybe home is the Boston area, the site of my school and my friends and the experiences that have come to define me. And I like this idea, because it explains why I was so blindsided in that Hingham office when I learned that I had left the land that I know.

But while the idea is comforting, it is overly simplistic. I belong to more than one city, and in each, my experience does not begin or end with lines on a map. After all, when I first left Boston’s city limits, I didn’t even notice; I watched strange landmarks roll by and still saw them as “mine”. I was complacent in my conviction that I belonged, until a woman behind a counter informed me that I did not.

So I question my assumption that home has physical boundaries at all. Certainly I construct them––I tell myself that I fit only within one region on a map, one niche within my community—but they must be artificial. I can leave and feel secure; I can stay and feel adrift. Home can’t be entirely external.

On the other hand, I know that I do not exist in a vacuum. I take up space; I leave a trail; I understand my experiences in the context of their locations. Home can’t be entirely internal either.

So home must be the point where the external and internal converge. It is every place that lines up with an element of my identity. It is every place that has shaped me. It is Boston, and it is Canada, and it is my dorm and my apartment and the moldy tree house in my parents’ backyard.

And these places don’t suddenly cease to define me once I vacate them. If home is part of my identity, then it isn’t something I can leave behind at all. It will stay with me until the end of my days. It will always be something I bring, rattling loudly and reliably at my heels like a beat-up green canvas suitcase.

Laura E. Hatt ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House.