I often hear people say home isn't really a place; they say it's the people. In my only 21 years, I have managed to somehow make this a point of catharsis. Maybe reassurance needs a tangible quality, and maybe that has always fueled my contention with who, what, when, and where home is. 

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As many other seniors in college, I've been filled with a strange feeling where moments that haven't even passed are starting to become moments that will be missed. Although, unlike most seniors I know, I can say college is the first time I've spent such a long time knowing people. Four full years of knowing someone outside my family, their presence confirmed in the flesh as I see them each day.  

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At a time when so many of my peer’s reminiscence spills into a fear of leaving something forever, I’ve arrived at  an interesting point. 

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As evident from its welcome campaign, the University of Michigan tries hard to ensure we know that we are “hoMe” before we know anything of the place itself. How clever, to place everything we come to know in Ann Arbor as an instance as grounded as home. It’s worked, but it can’t erase years of my expertise to navigate such familiarity –  leaving the people, the streets my feet are well acquainted with, the weather I’ve adapted to. Knowing this place is almost like another trinket added to a collection of the nine other places I've lived in before it. Make no mistake, however; each year I’ve aged has made starting anew a larger mountain to climb. Time has at least taught me to get used to it, and get used to it fast. Unfortunately, this past year I've been especially slow.

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Something shifted when my parents took too long to leave the metro-Detroit suburb of Troy at the end of my junior year of college. Six years in one place was an anomaly, one that let me believe I could finally say my home was something singular. Ha! I’ve so easily typed something that’s making me wince at my own words — I hated to even say Troy was “home”. You’ll get it if you get me. 

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Point being, this isn’t the whole truth. That may unravel itself in bits and pieces.  

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I’ve found that most people assume home is stable, though even that is often a matter of coming across a time where they’ve recognized that word is worth deconstructing. Most simply, it’s been  a noun that has an immediate association in conversation, an immediate answer to who, what, where, when, and many other questions for what home has been to them. That is, until something proves otherwise — a loss, a change, a place that becomes unrecognizable. Moving often has just meant I've contemplated this to a degree much earlier, and more consciously , than those who haven’t had my experience. In all these revisions of a concept that is simultaneously made and lost each time I move, I’m confronted with the same question: what did I carry with me, and what got left behind? Whether those were by choice or by nature, I can only discover now. All that I’ve ever felt of reconstructing a “home” has hardly been cemented in written words. 

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This is that attempt. 

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Through a collection of short stories and essays, I hope to trace what each place taught me - not just about what I thought home was, but about the way in which I chose to understand it. Exploring that has opened a box of worms as it led to me a process of exploring how I’ve come to be as I am. Maybe you know your home easily, but you - that can’t be as easy. So here’s what I’ve learned: The first lesson was to acknowledge that moving has made me a liar. But to explain what I mean, I have to start everything I’ve said above all over again — the way most honest things do.