temporary homes

notes on the end of an era

Photo by Stefan K on Unsplash

I’m in my room, it’s 1AM. I’m calling a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while. I’m telling him about how lovely my apartment in Cambridge is, how spoiled it’s made me, how I’m not sure if I can survive uni without an en-suite, a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, and a kitchenette. This has made me so spoiled, I joke; forget uni this fall, how can I go back to my hometown *tomorrow?*

I say it cheekily, I make it into a bit– he laughs, references the song “champagne problems”– but on some level, I know the things I say when I’m joking are often truer than the things I have the courage to say out loud.

I am not worried about the dishwasher. I am worried about losing home.

The problem is that home was only ever supposed to last eight weeks.

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What no one tells you about temporary communities is that they will ruin you.

Not in any of the ways you’d expect. They ruin you by working *too well*– by showing you, in compressed time, exactly how good life can be when you’re surrounded by people who are trying to do the same impossible thing you are. And then they end, on schedule, as advertised.

I spent this winter in Cambridge, at a research program. Eight weeks. It was the happiest I have ever been.

I want to be precise about this, because “the happiest I’ve ever been” is the kind of phrase people use loosely, and I don’t mean it loosely. Cambridge was my first time living away from my hometown, my first breath of fresh air after having felt as though I wasted so much of my life in high school. The first time I had the freedom to work on what I thought really mattered, to optimize for impact, instead of for instrumental gain.

For a couple of weeks after having arrived in Cambridge, I’d sometimes catch myself having a brief jolt of anxiety late at night, as the thought occurred to me: did I forget to submit an assignment? Then I’d have to remind myself, there aren’t any assignments anymore, and the spike of fear would dissipate, slowly, as if in disbelief. That was my life for 3.5 years: overcommitting, working myself to exhaustion, studying till 3AM until I physically could not keep my eyes open, crying myself to sleep because I felt so overwhelmed. 11 classes in one semester, 9 APs in one year, always feeling tired and always feeling that this was wrong, that this was not how I was meant to be spending my time, that surely no instrumental gain could be worth any of this. That there must be more to life than this.

The prison was entirely self-constructed, which is the worst kind, because there’s no warden to blame and no sentence to count down.

Cambridge was parole; and at first, it felt too good to be true. I didn’t trust it for weeks.

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There is a specific alchemy to temporary communities that I think people don’t talk about enough. Summer camps, residencies, study abroad programs, fellowships– they produce a depth of connection that seems wildly disproportionate to their duration. You spend eight weeks with strangers and leave feeling like you’ve known them for years. You spend four years at a high school and leave feeling like you barely knew anyone at all.

I think it’s because temporary communities strip away the long game.

In a permanent community– your hometown, your school, your office, even some friendships– relationships are strategic whether you want them to be or not. There’s always a future to manage. You modulate what you say because you’ll see this person next semester, next year, at the reunion. To some degree, you’re forced– or at the very least, pressured– to perform a version of yourself that’s optimized for longevity.

In a temporary community, the end date is visible from the start. Everyone knows this is finite. And something about that shared awareness of finitude makes people reckless with their honesty, their kindness, their time. You skip the small talk. You stay up until 2AM on a Tuesday talking about whether consciousness is computable, because why not, because there are only six weeks left, five, four. Someone helps you with linear algebra and then meets you at a conference in Paris, and you both take a picture with Yoshua Bengio. You get breakfast at a 500-year-old college and a man tells you about leaving journalism in Venezuela to work on AI safety, and suddenly your own semi-strange choices (namely, planning to drop out of uni) feel less strange.

I suspect the compression serves as a forcing function for speeding up connection. Forty conversations that would have been spread across two years happen in two weeks instead, and the density of it produces a kind of emotional nuclear fusion (sleep deprivation also helps!). You become a family, fast, without really realizing it, and without really deciding to.

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The problem, of course, is the ending.

I’ve never been good at goodbyes. It’s the common bittersweetness of not knowing when I’ll see someone again, made more potent by the sinking feeling that you probably mattered more to me than I did to you– which turns into resentment at my own psyche, at the fact that I get attached to people so easily, that when I fall for someone, I fall hard, I harbor complicated feelings, I stay silent for years. The first crush I ever had lasted four.

I once sent a voice memo to the group chat of a weeklong summer camp, my voice breaking, telling them all how much they meant to me. I remember I always felt I was too much, even for myself; too emotional, too expressive, too afraid to let the cracks show yet unable to hold the water in.

Perhaps this is why I booked my flight back from the UK a day early. In theory, it was because of prices. In reality, I think my subconscious didn’t want to have to say goodbye to my eight-week family. Some of the most formative eight weeks of my life– and definitely the happiest.

Perhaps Irish exits are because people care too much, rather than the reverse.

I guess I still find myself afraid to let the cracks show.

But I wonder if the reason temporary communities work so well is precisely because people let the water in. Because the end date gives you permission to be the messy, intense, embarrassingly sincere version of yourself– and somehow, miraculously, you look around and see that everyone else is doing it too.

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Sometimes, there are moments in your life that feel too staged to be real. It feels too performative, like surely, such a perfect bookending couldn’t have just naturally happened.

Or perhaps I want it to not be real, somehow. Perhaps I would like to pretend this is all for show, and it is not really the end. Because if I think about it too long, if I really think about this beautiful chapter of my life coming to a close, it is so heartbreaking.

On the flight to the UK eight weeks ago, I turned 18. On the flight home, a boy– with the same name as one of my cousins, and similarly aged– turned 10.

What a lovely reminder, as J says, of all the apartments that are not for sale.¹ Of the fact that others’ lives are as brilliantly multicolored and multifaceted as my own. That everyone has their own unique life story. That as absorbed as I am in my own little world, the same is true for the rest of the world. The things that feel so momentous in my life barely register on the radars of my friends, let alone those of strangers.

As Nandini says, someday it’s possible that ERA will just be a footnote in the story of my life. I hope so– I’m going to try my best to make sure that it’s only onward and upward from here.

But I hope that footnote is written in such a way that does it justice, because Pre-Cambridge-Sophie and Post-Cambridge Sophie feel like completely different people.

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To my Cambridge family: I love you all, I miss you all, and you are all precious to me. Thank you to those who took me under their wings, those who treated me as equals, every person who checked in when I was sick, every person who smiled at me and made small talk in the office canteen. Nanda and Annabella for being like older sisters. Rhea for economic chats and helping me pull off that prank. Ady for the tea and Ireland and journaling and helping me achieve a precious childhood dream. Andrew for the linear algebra and Paris and Yoshua Bengio and for being like the older brother I always wished I had. Lee and Elias for jokes and relationship advice in an Uber ride. Sam and Jian Xin for chats about age and agency. Jackson and Varun for policy chats and commiseration over Washington bureaucracy. Matthew for the oat milk and a legendary Scott Alexander linkpost. Girish for breakfast at King’s, conversations on dropping out, and for telling me about a fascinating career change. Alex for lawless dinners and discussions on time travel. David for the exceptional kindness and warmth, always. Ruqaiya and Genevieve for the light and joy. Poppy for the unyielding positivity and for sitting with me when I was scared to send a hard email. Ian for the Claude advice and surprisingly good dad jokes. Zuzanna for being a girlboss. Becca for reminding me of my mom (who I love dearly). Laura and Perla for being queens. And many more.

Thank you for the snippets and stories and the oh-so-many quotes in the #overheard channel. For making ERA Winter 2026 the tight-knit, supportive community that it was.

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Goodbye, sweet Cambridge.

I will miss the peaceful greenery, the lovely bike lanes, the desk I used to work, even the rains. Most of all, I will miss my eight-week family.

When all is said and done, it’s not the dishwasher that haunts me (though I will miss it dearly): it’s the inability to deal with the end of an era.

1. This is a reference to a book called Anxious People! Highly recommend :)

Also, today I learned there’s a name for this– sonder, the realization that every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.