Girl’s Guide to Going Home

Illustration: Sydney Hanson

There has always been a timer set on Kingston, counting down to graduation. From the second I knew I’d be attending Queen’s, the progression of years was laid out for me. I knew exactly what the four years after high school would look like, a vision laced with pre-constructed ideas of university and the college experience brought to me by older siblings, friends and the media. Of course, the pandemic set these plans back a bit, causing me to stay home during first year. I’ve detoured into a fifth year as well but the same rules have always applied. Kingston has always been a home with a ticking clock attached.

The home you create in your university town is built in a bubble. Every year, thousands of new students arrive, most freshly 18 or close to, and likely their first time away from home. You arrive together, grow together, and leave together. For many of us, university has been a given future, engraved in our minds from childhood. Canada’s university degree rate was noted as the largest in the G7 countries in 2023. My graduating class had near a 100% university rate. There was never any doubt in my mind how I’d spend these years.

However, this long mental preparation does not make it any easier. Moving away from home to an entirely new city is extremely difficult. Living in close proximity to strangers is unfamiliar and awkward, often not ending well. But still, we persevere, and life in university can create some of the best memories, and the home you build here can grow to feel more natural and comfortable than that you left behind. The relationships you build at university are all consuming. If you’re lucky enough to love your housemates you can spend 24/7 together 7 days a week from meals to movies to parties and bars ending with sleepovers. We romanticize and idealize. We take too many photos and cover the walls of our student houses. We claim favourite spots to study and get coffee and revel in the long nights out. We have ‘family’ dinners and drink lots of wine, dress up and down, and celebrate made up holidays. And we’ll cry when it’s over, because Kingston has truly become home.

Heading towards graduation, watching the hourglass slowly run dry, the question of ‘home’ remains unanswered for the first time in my life. Odds are I’ll be back in my parents house, at least for a while. It is a privilege, knowing that wherever my parents are I will be welcome.

But the idea of moving back into my parents house is a complicated feeling. The life and comfort I grew up with there is gone. The past has become just that, history. Gradually, as Kingston became more and more familiar, the school breaks and summer vacations back in my childhood city started to feel more like holidays than homecomings, spent fitting uncomfortably back into a shedded skin from an 18-year-old girl who doesn’t exist anymore. It is an ill-suited costume on a 22-year-old body. My mom has reorganized the kitchen- I have to ask where everything is now. My room still holds mismatched boxes that I never unpacked from moving in and out of my various student houses. I am a visitor, a tourist now. I make my rounds to old friends and old spots, I catch up and reminisce. There are things I miss and look forward to in going back, but it is a break from my reality, my real life which has resided in Kingston for the last four years.

The homes I’ve had have left their mark on me just as I’ve left my mark on them, and I’ll carry them into the next life I create. I’ll hang the same photos on the wall, and have the same habits. I’ll sip a rum and coke and think of The Ale House and Trivia at brass. I’ll crave the breakfast sandwich from Juniper and try to recreate it (it’ll never be as good as the original). Losing Kingston will be bittersweet, but I’ve always known that.

Unlike high school there are no clear next steps, no knowledge of what my life might look like in five years. What if I didn’t move back into my parents house? What would that look like? Where will I be and who will I know? School has always been a crutch and a safety net, and the realities of my working life in these next stages of adulthood are entirely unknown to me.

Will I find a job in a different city, even a new country? Who will be my support group? Could this next home be my last, where I settle down? Is it where I’ll raise a family? I’m only 22 but with the future wide open, anything can happen. I exist in an in-between, where permanence could be just around the corner or far out of reach.

My time here was always going to come to an end. I can only look forward now, not with fear and anxiety but anticipation. Well, ok, and also some fear and anxiety. But I’m no longer the naive 18 year old girl who moved away to university. These formative years of my life have been riddled with growth and change, moments of turmoil but also memories that I will treasure forever. I’m excited to set up a new life, to meet new friends and tell stories from my days at Queen’s. I’m excited to meet the new version of myself, coloured and designed according to the next home I build, though the question of where and how remains open.

Home isn’t just a location, it is a concept, created and ever evolving as you leave your mark on the people and places surrounding you. There are pieces from childhood, from Queen’s that I’ll carry with me forever. There will always be parts of me that belong back in Markham, or that will belong back here in Kingston. There will be pieces of me that I’ll leave behind, and years from now when I visit I look forward to seeing the ghost of that girl on these streets. But I also look forward to who I’ll become, the new habits and experiences that will intertwine themselves with me, the people and places that will become as much a home as Kingston was to me.

The idea of the unknown doesn’t scare me, not like it used to.