¿Dónde está mi hogar?

Title translation: Where is my home?

College is a time of adaption: moving in and out of dorm rooms, back home for the summer, into an apartment, etc. It's a great time to perfect the art of last-minute packing and a good lesson about the hassle that is materialism.  During these past few years, I have become much better at adjusting to new settings and situations.

With all these moves, it's not hard to wonder where "home" actually is. In fact, my friends and I have discussed this more than once.  We were in agreement that the first time we referred to school as "home" was a strange feeling.  And if my school is in fact my home, what happens next year when I graduate? Where will my home be then?

Personally, I prefer to think of my home not as a place, but as a feeling.  I will always feel at home with my family and friends in my not-to-be-disclosed California town.  There I am relaxed, happy, welcomed, loved, and all sorts of warm emotions which are hard to capture with words.  But my time there is always too short -- I have to move on to the next place after only a few short weeks.

Luckily, I can find a similar feeling in other places too. I have found a home at school with my residential college's awesome spirit (JIBA!) and the wonderful people I've met there.  School is also the host of my intellectual endeavors which are a totally different kind of home.  These homey feelings are also reproduced by a Skype session or phone conversation with my siblings or good friends from high school.

Currently, I don't think my month here in Spain has permitted me to feel totally at home -- the flood of new people, places, and language in a small amount of time probably prohibit developing those intense emotional connections to a place.  Yet, I still have so much love for Salamanca as a town and for what it represents, which is an exploratory and exciting time coming directly before what will be one of the most surreal, stressful, and frightening years of my life.  This small dive into the unknown is only a preview of post-graduation life and I revel in its fleetingness. It's like having a safety net: I knew coming in that I would be confronted with new, and maybe scary, experiences but that after a month I would return to the coziness of my family and friends back home.

Sometimes (or... every time) when I think about my future, I am scared by all the imminent changes.  Who knows where I'll live, what I'll be doing, who I'll be with...my mind runs wild considering all the possibilities.  The best and only comfort is knowing I can find home again by picking up the phone and calling my family or my best of friends.