You just arrived at the airport. It’s snowing white everywhere. Security agents shout at you to go to the right line, and police officers coldly ask your reasons for entering the country. An eternity passes before you are reunited with your suitcases. You just made it back to Montreal. And that feeling, the strange mix of loneliness, emptiness, and nostalgia, serves as a reminder that you can belong to more than one place at the same time. 

For those who had the chance to go home for the winter break, going back can feel like a blessing. All of a sudden, the weight of having to survive on your own dissolves—it’s like a trip back to childhood. You just sit, and the world rearranges itself around you. No more worrying about buying groceries; the kitchen smells like things you forgot you loved; someone asks if you have eaten.

Your bed waits for you, exactly the way you left it. Your room is full of outdated decorations you swore you would change one day but never did. Posters, old books, dusty souvenirs, all proof that time passed while you weren’t looking.

Then you see your friends, walk to the same bar. The city has not changed, but somehow everything has. You all order the same drinks, and just like that, the conversations pick up exactly where they left off.

You catch up on the local drama: Who still hasn’t left town, who finally got a job, who got married, who broke up, who no one has heard from in years. For a while, you forget that you left. In that way, coming back also feels like a curse. Just when you get used to it, you have to leave again. The goodbye only grows heavier, like a quiet reminder of how far apart we really are from the ones we love and the ones that love us. 

Distance stops being a Speed x Time calculation and starts becoming something tangible. It lives in your chest, in your heart, in the way your throat tightens at airport gates.

So you try to prepare yourself. You avoid the rituals of arrival. You skip class during Add/Drop period, let your suitcase—still not yet unpacked—gather dust in the corner of your room. You repeat to yourself that you’re just passing through, that this is temporary.

But the truth is, it always gets to you.

You settle in without meaning to. You learn the streets again, you find your way back into your classes. You reconnect with your friends, your roommates. Days become longer and brighter. You start planning for Igloofest and going on study dates at McLennan. You return to bar crawling on Saint-Laurent or Crescent. You stop checking the time difference. You stop calling home every day.

For reading week, you hesitate between renting a cabin in the woods, finally visiting New York, or actually reading? Visiting your family can wait, you tell yourself. And that’s when you realize you belong. You’re busy now; you have a life here, so much so that when summer break approaches, the ache returns.

You pack your life into a suitcase again. You start counting goodbyes like a ritual: Last class, last metro ride, last late night, last hug. It stings, but only because you have settled in so fully, because the streets, the friends, the routines have become yours again.

So if, coming back from break, nostalgia weighs on you, if your chest feels too full, know this: It’s not permanent. You’re not failing at being away. You’re just learning how to live in more than one place.

Homesickness hurts because it shows how deeply we belong. For international students, this feeling becomes a paradox: We don’t want to leave the home where we grew up, yet we also don’t want to leave the city where we have become someone new, where we have grown in ways we never imagined. 

The ache of leaving is both a reminder and a gift; it proves that we have the capacity to carry multiple homes in our hearts, wherever we go.