Chapel Hill may be my home for nine months of the year, but it's not my home.
As we wrap up our first few weeks of classes, I feel like it’s prime time for an ache of familiarity to begin wiggling back into students’ chests. Now, that the novelty of coming back to campus has faded, we find ourselves missing our hometowns a bit more than usual.
I grew up on Long Island, New York — yes, on, not in — so while I appreciate how different Chapel Hill is, things that remind me home are few and far between here. There are no egg bagels (a crime against humanity); no New York pizza (if you say, “Hannah, what about I *heart* N.Y. Pizza on Franklin Street?” I will cry) and no easy access to the water (I’m talking ocean, not Jordan Lake).
Living so far away means that I can’t exactly visit on a whim, but even if I could drive 548 miles to the house I grew up in, I don’t think that it would magically make me feel better. Home isn’t just the smell of the Long Island Sound, the turns of my favorite running trails or the creak of the old floorboards in my living room. Because then yes, I ache for all of those things, but without the memories and people I associate them with, they are meaningless.
In some ways, I’m often less sick for home, the place, and more so for home — the feeling. But you can’t always recreate something so specific and intangible. You can drive back to your childhood house, but you can’t drive back to your childhood when you were a kid and everything seemed so simple.
So, instead of filling up my gas tank whenever I wish I could be “home,” I put on my sad girl homesick playlist. Let me walk you through some of my favorites:
In typical Long Island girl style, Billy Joel (a L.I. KING) has to be first on my list. “Vienna” was always a go-to song for screaming at the top of my lungs with all my friends in high school.
“Anna Sun” by WALK THE MOON reminds me of jumping off the bridge into the river at Sunken Meadow State Park and hoping that the water is deep enough that I won’t hit bottom.
“There’s Still A Light In The House” by Valley is L.I. in early fall; my favorite time of year. The leaves changing colors and the morning frost; high school Hannah in her itchy Catholic school sweater, driving down the Northern State with the heat blasting but the windows rolled all the way down.
