Whispering Home

Home.

The concept of home is an odd one; why do we place so much merit in where we come from? Why is the place, the community that shaped us so important to our future selves?

The clock ticks closer and closer to that moment on stage where I will hold my diploma in my hands, and I feel neither anxious nor excited. Instead, there is a numbness that pulls at my body, a numbness like that which seeps into your bones walking through the fourth blizzard of the season on your trek from Cilley to the science center.

But there is no cold now, just a numbness inside me. I drift through my final term, my last 10 weeks here at Exeter, in a haze; nothing affects me. People pass through my life like whispers. Emotions tug at my heart for a second, and then float away into the abyss.

I want to feel nostalgic. I want to feel some sort of sentiment for the people that have changed my life here. For they have: that is indisputable. I am not the same reclusive, innocent boy I was when I first stepped foot on this campus, and for that, I am grateful to this school, my teachers, my dormmates and my friends.

But I can’t feel any sort of sentiment right now. I want to cry, to feel some sort of fondness when I look back on the three years of memories I have here. But instead, I feel an overwhelming wall of apathy.

Home.

This isn’t to say I don’t love my friends. I do. I love them like a family, like brothers and sisters.

My dorm: the first place I ever pulled an all-nighter, the first place I ever watched “The Dark Knight Rises,” the first place I was comfortable enough to let my guards down, the first place I ever truly trusted someone.And some of my closest friends don’t live with me: the Soule boys, girls around campus—no, Mom, they’re just friends—and day students have all helped me grow, and I hope I have helped them in return.

Exeter, I used to think, and as cliché as it might be, was hell on Earth, and I know many of you can sympathize. The late nights, the tears, the sweat, the blood, the sickness, the emotional rollercoaster all seemed so horrible at the time. But now, I find that I will miss it: the constant hectic atmosphere, one that was shared by all of us.

Home.

“Friends are the family you choose,” said someone a long time ago, probably someone who got paid to spend all day thinking up smart-sounding things like this. You are my family, Exeter. You are the people I chose to be my family, and you have changed me for the better.

Which is why I’m numb. I guess apathy isn’t the right word—more just a cancelling out of a swirl of emotions. Much like the swirling of paint colors together: It’s first grade art, and I sit at the messy splattered table learning that red and green and blue and yellow mixes together to create an ugly muddy brown (not white, as it scientifically should—the reason for this is lost on me). I await the moment they call my name on June 5 with apprehension: The sun beating down on our necks, me sweating through my armpits and down my back in a Burlington Coat Factory blazer that I look VERY good in, shaking Principal MacFarlane’s hand and feeling the smile of my parents and my friends reflected onto me.