My mother turns the corner in her dusty SUV onto the street where I grew up, and I see my dogs’ ears perk up in the back seat. They push up against each other to press their noses up against the window, and I, too, turn my head to look to the left, waiting for the curve of the street to straighten out and reveal my home over the horizon.

Home? My home? The words feel stilted on my lips.

Sure, this is where I was raised, where I spent the biggest part of my life. Many years from now, when that fact is maybe no longer true, this will still be where I spent the most important part of my life. Yet I still feel weird calling it home.

The car comes to a halt. My mother helps me carry my luggage out from the car and my dogs run to my front doorstep. My sweaty palm collides with the rough metal of my doorknob, and already I feel claustrophobic. All at once I am very aware of my mother standing four paces behind me, my dogs stepping on my feet, the man with the pickup truck across the street watching me with wary eyes — I think he used to be a cop, but I don’t know, we’ve never spoken. The walls are closing in, and I’m still outside.

I’ve fought so hard for nearly a decade of my life to leave this place, the house haunted by broken relics of a past I’ve tried to leave behind, and going to college felt like I had finally succeeded. I remember moving into my dorm on the first day of college, just sitting on my bed, alone, after my mother finally left and feeling nothing but relief. Here I was, finally on my own.

Returning to Columbus feels like I’ve failed. To go the better part of four months at a time only visiting home on occasion, out of necessity, and then have to return for a full three months...it feels like everything I did in college, everything I escaped by making it there no matter what anybody said, no matter what everybody said, well, it’s just gone.

For the last week I spent in Oxford, all everyone wanted to say was how ready they were to go to their homes — to see their pets, to see their friends — and sure, I was ready for the semester to be over, and I missed my dogs, but everyone seemed a lot more excited than me.

This isn’t to say some cheesy or overly cliched “Oxford is my home," because that's certainly not true either. And in the end, when I imagine what my home would be like if I could ever find one, it would be a home filled with smells of brick and old beer, like High Street. It would have that constant breeze I find in the tea shop my friends and I frequent after work, and I could see the Thurber House, where I truly grew up, from my bedroom window. But it sure wouldn’t be here.

I walk up to my old bedroom, a perfect time capsule of me at age 11. Nothing has really changed since then. The walls are painted a light blue, my Hermione Granger and Beatles posters are still hanging above my bed next to dozens upon dozens of hand-drawn pictures I’ve tacked up from floor to ceiling that even now when I turn on my fan will crackle and blow in the middle of the night, sometimes even dislodging themselves from their pushpin prisons and floating up over my bed before falling face down onto the floor below.

Looking down at my guitar sitting in the corner, at least five years of dust on its strings is that one picture of me as a baby that I hate — I'm maybe one and a half years old — taken by my mother in my grandfather's garden in spring. I don't remember the day at all, but for once I look happy. Maybe that's why I hate it: because I don't remember ever being happy as a kid.

I think about who I was at age 11, and I wonder what 11-year-old me would think about coming back to the home I swore I would one day leave. Behind the Year of the Tiger 2010 calendar that I got from a Chinese restaurant, you can still make out the words I HATE YOU carved over and over again on the wall with the back of a metal ruler I found in my dad’s office drawer.

But I also know that 11-year-old me never thought he would leave. He thought eight years was forever and sooner or later fate would catch up to him like it always did.

And at the very least, I’ve proven him wrong.