Virginia Peng

In high school, I would wake at 6 a.m. to a freezing cold room, practically frigid, for it only being October. I would dread putting on my uniform, how cold my bare legs would feel in my kilt because I refused to wear itchy tights. 

I didn’t understand why everyone was obsessed with fall — I wasn’t a pumpkin spice aficionado. Falls in Vancouver are wet, in the tenth grade it rained every single day of October and November. “Gilmore Girls” seemed like a fantasy, made up world. I didn’t actually understand that Connecticut was a real place. 

Now, I relish fall in New England. Those perfect late September days where it is sunny and warm but the leaves fall like snow and the air smells of honeycrisp apples. 

It is for this reason that I haven’t once gone home for October break. 

As a true West Coaster, through and through, I know I only have so many east coast falls. So I relish the brief time that I get here. 

Of course, I also haven’t gone home for fall break because it is too far, too expensive and too overwhelming to visit my emotionally-loaded hometown. 

But, this year, senior year, I am finally going to have a fall Homecoming. 

I didn’t fly home for October break when I was so depressed I didn’t think I would make it through the semester. When I called my mom begging her to put me in an in-patient facility. 

I didn’t even fly home for October break when my mother was doing her last three months of a year of chemotherapy. 

I imagine my Homecoming will look something like this: I will wake with my sweet crusty little white dog in my bed, and my mom will have already gotten up to go to work at 6 a.m. I will suddenly be overwhelmed with a sense of panic, that something is truly and deeply wrong. I will rush out of bed to my parents room to check if my dad is still breathing. He will be, hopefully snoring, sound asleep. Since he got sick, I have been overcome with visions of the moment I get “the call.”

This is why I am home for October break for the first time in my Yale career. My dad will be upset when he reads this. He will hate to hear that I’m coming home because I fear that every moment I get to spend with him will be my last. 

I am not going home to wake up to my mother baking cinnamon rolls and to frolic with home friends and play in the changing leaves. Most of my home friends have moved away. 

Any sense of Homecoming, to me, has become deeply bittersweet over the years. New Haven and Yale, despite their many flaws, have become home. They’ve become my escape for the past four years. There was a brief wobble in this sense of home, a significant breakup which sent me running to Sweden. But that’s the problem with running from what you know and are too scared to face, your fears will only catch up with you.

The last Homecoming I had was before my dad got sick. I flew home from Stockholm, after an extremely dark and cold semester. I slept the entire flight from Sweden to New York, and then sat and stared out the window the entire flight from New York to Vancouver. The air in Vancouver is scented by years of old growth forests which have been carefully preserved, tinged with crisp snow and sweet salty ocean tang. It smells like home. 

Never before have I felt ecstacy like when I landed in Vancouver after my four months in Sweden. I surprised my pseudo-sister at her 24th birthday party. I had more energy than I had had all year. I knew everything was going to be okay. 

Now, I come home to a much sadder reality, for a much more significant purpose.

Of course, I must shamefully admit that I am not just returning home because of my duties as a devoted and loving daughter. I want to see Hillary, my beloved nail tech, Sam, my sweet old Prius — and of course, there’s a boy. 

Despite the sad and tormenting circumstances that resulted in me forking over an arm and a leg on JetBlue red-eyes to Vancouver, there is a hopeful reality in which my October break is sweet and sentimental. 

I wake in my childhood bed with my crusty white dog; my mom has already left for work at 6 a.m., and I check on my dad to find him sitting in bed, reading as he always is. He smiles at me, and I remember that despite the ever volatile circumstances of life, at least I am home.