There’s something unsettling about having to pack up a whole uni room at the end of each term – and having to squeeze everything I need to live here for a term into my parents’ car. Frustrating, of course – I couldn’t live further away from my accommodation’s car park, or up any more stairs, even if I’d been purposefully trying to distance myself from it. To add to that, I’m yet to master the art of packing with any sense of coordination. I found my kitchen knives in my bathroom bin when I arrived at the start of this term. But there’s something other than the frustration: there is a feeling of unsettlement. 

The three terms we spend in Cambridge amount to little more than half the year. So, for half the year, my cheese grater has a perfect spot in my student kitchen, and the other half of the year? The guiltless utensil is banished to an oversized storage box, awaiting my return to Cambridge, awaiting my return to an alternate home.

Having homes in two places at once feels contradictory, and the heaviness of it is only increased by that incredibly distinct boundary between the two: the unsettlement of packing everything up and moving each time.

Having spent a summer on trains around Europe, moving between shared hostel rooms every other night, maybe this moving only once every nine weeks should feel quite stable – permanent, perhaps. After a month of constant hostel jumping, I found myself in Hamburg, sharing a room with six people I barely had time to speak to, having arrived late and with plans to leave early. One of them conducted his business meetings at 3am (perhaps made understandable when recognised that his business involved trying to move quite a lot of class A drugs out of Germany). My stay was temporary. I was never going to spend more than one night there (which is probably for the best.) Those people weren’t my closest friends. I probably couldn’t pick them out of a line-up now.

There was actually an appeal in knowing I was around people I’d never meet again, being somewhere for such a short amount of time, and that place being little more to me than a stopover between Berlin and Cologne. And the belongings I had with me were specifically chosen to be packed up frequently and carried on my back. There was no intention to fully unpack. I didn’t want to feel permanently settled; that unsettled feeling was the intention, I suppose. There was a contradictory feeling of being settled while I was constantly moving – the change was expected. None of my fleeting stops were meant to feel like home.

Leaving my hometown at the start of summer was a conscious move away from being permanently settled, and in returning, the feeling of coming home was unparalleled. Sure, being away from home and each stop feeling so purposely ephemeral was beautiful, but returning came with a confusingly late feeling of homesickness. The possibility of a home-cooked meal and a cuddle with my dog, and sleeping in one place for weeks on end was suddenly really appealing. Suddenly I wanted to be at home more than anything else. But my return home was immediately marked by my intention to move out again – the impending A-level results day ensured as much.

Leaving that time, at the end of September, felt more confusing. Unlike during my summer’s travels, I wanted to sculpt another home. I wanted this new city to feel permanent, homely, familiar. I wanted to feel settled. That feeling of unsettlement, I think, is because I do feel at home here, and my childhood home and home here in Cambridge can’t seem to co-exist.  My hometown isn’t far from Cambridge – I could be back there for dinner if I really wanted to be. But the geographical proximity doesn’t allow for the two places to co-exist in my mind. I don’t travel home during term time. I exist, as so many of us seem to, in the Cambridge bubble, and the comfort of the other home, the childhood home, which is a luxury for after term ends.

There is one liminal space between the two – the packing. The packing is the sole marker of the change, the transition. 

I could quite easily feel bogged down, but I love my life in Cambridge, despite that bubble of supervisions, the library, and Sainsbury’s. And then I love my life in my hometown. I think they are both beautiful, and if the unsettled feeling of packing each term is the sacrifice for getting two homes, two places I adore and, two places where I can be surrounded by people I love, then I’m OK with that.

That feeling of unsettlement is just a symptom of my movement between the two. That’s more of a privilege than a plight.