"Build your own circle carefully"

I used to carry the smell of my mother's cooking on my hands and the echo of our living room down the walk across campus. Homesickness was a physical ache at night while dorm halls hummed with groups I did not fit into. I learned to make a space where the language my family used mattered and my classmates' slang did not erase my voice.

I started hosting dinners with takeout from the corner shop, string lights above a folding table, people who had similar lonelinesses sharing stories until the room softened. We celebrated small wins, helped each other with FAFSA forms, and taught each other how to answer questions about where we were from. Those makeshift rituals turned strangers into a community that felt like fiction becoming true.

Nobody at home understood and nobody at school looked like me so I learned to be my own people.