Students always in transit

This decision can manifest itself in lots of ways. For example, it can mean nursing an obligatory addiction to keep-in-touch technology, an unwillingness to collect anything that doesn’t fit on an iPod, and a reluctance to commit to relationships.

I keep a whole range of friendships running entirely through Facebook, and after a couple years of shuttling between school and home, I started giving away my favourite books. I worried about how much time they would spend in a box instead of on a shelf, so I found good homes for Norwegian Wood and Middlesex and The Places in Between.

And when my grandmother or my hairdresser asks me if I have a boyfriend, I mentally calculate when would be a good time to acquire one, like getting a puppy or tending to a garden full of perennials. Any relationship, after all, comes with an ultimatum – spend a lot of time on Skype, or learn to love the built-in best-before date. Love would complicate that clear formula, so I try my best to avoid it.

Instead of books or boyfriends, I acquire ambitious lists of the places I would like to live. Edinburgh. Munich. New York. Vancouver.

We’re often referred to as a hooked-up, signed-in generation – constantly available via phone and email while ignoring the people sitting next to us on the bus. Maybe this is because we’re also a generation in transit, always looking for the next challenge and the next move, trading stability for stimulation and real conversation for “communication” with the many people we’ve left behind.

It’s certainly the path I’ve chosen, and I think it’s the one required of me, in any case. Even when I hate to leave again and again, especially when “keeping in touch” seems like such a flimsy comfort so far from home, I’m still young enough to fantasize about each new place, with little regard for the consequences.

Eventually I’ll have to “settle down” – but right now the concept seems so far away, so foreign, so grown up, I don’t even know what it would look like. Maybe I’ll end up in a place and I won’t say goodbye – even a half version – for a long, long time.

But until then, at least I’ve got Skype.