Nantasket Beach

I am well acquainted with my suitcase. After all, we’ve spent a lot of time together: It’s moved me back and forth between Canada and America, between my little hometown and a city where no one knows my name, between my parents’ house and a college dorm and (most recently) a seedy summer apartment. I know that its wheels squeak at an uncomfortably high pitch. I know that its weight will bang into my calves at every other step unless I skip and hobble in a particular way. I know that it exists to displace me—and for that I resent every durable green inch of it.

After all, leaving home is hard. It is a starting-over, with both a demolition and a reconstruction. It forces me to stare hard at the aspects of myself that I cut loose, and it forces me to ask myself what I retain. How tightly am I bound to my location? What do I give up when I leave? Who am I, on my own?

I’ve asked these questions many times over many homes. This time, I ask them on the last day of summer, from the floor of my boxed-up Boston apartment, watching my belongings strain against the sides of that unholy green suitcase. My life looks small wrapped in cardboard and canvas.

Eventually, I can’t look anymore. I need to get out of this used-to-be home. I grab my wallet and a map and, with pleasing randomness, decide to visit the Boston Harbor Islands. They seem far and inconvenient, and I am fed up with staying in one place.

Two hours, two buses, and one subway ride later, I am standing inside the Boston Harbor Islands Ferry office. An older woman is in the process of closing the ticket kiosk, and seems annoyed by my presence. “The last ferry to the Islands left at one,” she says curtly. Then, registering the look on my face, she softens: “You could just catch the last ferry to Boston, though. There’s a lot to do there.”

First, I am bewildered. This isn’t Boston? Where am I? When did I leave my city? The woman informs me that we are in Hingham, but I’ve never heard of the town.

Second, I am scared. I don’t recognize Hingham. I don’t know how I got here. A strange brief flood of homesickness––for comfort, for familiarity, for my apartment the way it used to be––crashes on me with sudden force before I catch myself.

Third, I am anxious. If I can’t move forward, I have no choice but to head back. The thought makes me cringe. Turning around would make my foray futile, insubstantial like a three-month lease.

In desperation, I pull out my map and look for something––anything––that looks interesting. The only destination that even remotely fits the bill is a little spot on the coast marked Nantasket Beach.

I trudge back to the heat-baked highway and wait for the next bus. It takes me another two hours and the advice of a series of strangers, but I eventually make it to my destination.

Nantasket Beach is idyllic. The sand stretches down from a raised sidewalk in pale sun-bleached yellow dotted with pink and blue umbrellas. The waves froth high enough to sweep even adults off their feet. Shouting kids and screaming gulls and crashing surf produce a beach sound so perfect it feels slightly surreal.

The boardwalk is quaint and old-timey and lined in places with clamshells. I stop at an ice-cream parlor and buy vanilla soft-serve from a shy blond teenager. When I ask about things to do, he points me to something called Dream Machine—a cavernous arcade saturated with neon lights and the thunderous rattling of quarters. Small children yell and punch and run around. The building breathes nostalgia.

In fact, this entire town breathes nostalgia. It looks like an archetypal beach day, like something pulled from a postcard. I get the feeling that every square foot was designed to shout, “Home!”

The details are wrong, though. The beach is brighter than the narrow grey shores of my Boston summer, and flatter than the towering grassy dunes of my Lake Ontario childhood. The playgrounds are taller than the one where I lost my first tooth. I feel like I am strolling through someone else’s childhood memory, and resent the town’s pandering. I am not home.

My problem is that I can’t pinpoint exactly where that home is.

Home isn’t exclusively the tiny apartment where my things sit in boxes, or the freshman dorm where I used to sleep, or the blue house in rural Ontario that I visit on holidays. I belonged to each of those places once, but they don’t have exclusive claim anymore.

So I think broader, and I think that maybe home can be entire cities. Maybe home is the Boston area, the site of my school and my friends and the experiences that have come to define me. And I like this idea, because it explains why I was so blindsided in that Hingham office when I learned that I had left the land that I know.

But while the idea is comforting, it is overly simplistic. I belong to more than one city, and in each, my experience does not begin or end with lines on a map. After all, when I first left Boston’s city limits, I didn’t even notice; I watched strange landmarks roll by and still saw them as “mine”. I was complacent in my conviction that I belonged, until a woman behind a counter informed me that I did not.

So I question my assumption that home has physical boundaries at all. Certainly I construct them––I tell myself that I fit only within one region on a map, one niche within my community—but they must be artificial. I can leave and feel secure; I can stay and feel adrift. Home can’t be entirely external.

On the other hand, I know that I do not exist in a vacuum. I take up space; I leave a trail; I understand my experiences in the context of their locations. Home can’t be entirely internal either.

So home must be the point where the external and internal converge. It is every place that lines up with an element of my identity. It is every place that has shaped me. It is Boston, and it is Canada, and it is my dorm and my apartment and the moldy tree house in my parents’ backyard.

And these places don’t suddenly cease to define me once I vacate them. If home is part of my identity, then it isn’t something I can leave behind at all. It will stay with me until the end of my days. It will always be something I bring, rattling loudly and reliably at my heels like a beat-up green canvas suitcase.

Laura E. Hatt ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House.