I recently found myself homeless.

After returning home for Fall Break – if you can call it that – I realized I don’t have a home. I don’t feel entirely comfortable at my parents’ house any more, and my home in Charleston isn’t exactly where the heart is.

When I go back to my old stomping grounds for the occasional long weekend, I feel out of place. The excitement that precedes going “home” is always squelched when I finally get there.

The longer I stay away, it seems the less enthusiastic my friends and family become about my homecomings. The only creature who seems happy to see me is the dog, and he would greet an armed robber with a wagging tail and a slobbering kiss.

Feeling displaced is common for college students. In a way, we’re all gypsies, sleeping in unfamiliar beds and living amongst unpacked boxes. I’ve moved five times in the last two years. Adjusting to new environments is second nature to me now. Unfortunately, just when I become quasi-situated in a new pad, it’s time to move again.

And my first dwelling, the house I was born and raised in, is never going to be the home it once was.

I don’t even have a bedroom there anymore. I sleep on the couch and keep my belongings in a duffel bag the entire time I’m back for a visit.

My family usually ignores me when I’m in town, and hanging out with my old chums inevitably amounts to disappointment.

Friends I’ve had since elementary school, who didn’t go to college, can’t relate to my life as a student. They’ll never experience tailgating behind O’Brien Stadium or all-night after hours parties, and they think Stix is either a mythical river or something you pick up in your backyard.

My old pals are all getting married or popping out kids, while my college friends struggle to find dates. The same girls I spent every minute with in high school are too busy with their grown-up lives to tear up the town with me when I come around, and that makes me feel even more displaced.

Yet, as great as my college friends are, they don’t know me on the same level my as my hometown compadres. My newer friends weren’t there for after-school cruises, late-night trips to Taco Bell or the agonizing bore of my high school proms.

The great people I’ve met here at Eastern, to whom I owe many a fun time, are going to be gone soon. Once we’ve all finally graduated, which I hope we do, everyone will move on and find new places to call home.

College life is really unfair. Making new friends, losing old friends and moving as often as Mongolian goat herders cannot be healthy for anyone’s psyche.

Students become nomads during an already confusing time in anyone’s life. I guess we take our living situations for granted, and we rarely think about all of the different places we’ve hung our hats in the last few years.

Sometimes, when I’m lying in my interim bed at night, I look around my room and realize my surroundings are only temporary. On even scarier occasions, I’ll wake up in my shabby little room, and I’ll forget where I am entirely.

Perhaps I should be thankful I have a roof over my head at all, but sometimes I can’t help lamenting on how college students subconsciously become happy wanderers on a quest for the holy degree.