{"id":1006,"date":"2023-07-19T01:05:58","date_gmt":"2023-07-19T01:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/?p=1006"},"modified":"2023-07-27T19:24:24","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T19:24:24","slug":"988-miles-and-26-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/07\/988-miles-and-26-days\/","title":{"rendered":"988 miles and 26 days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I want to leave<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Tossing and turning in my squeaky twin-XL, I kept falling through sleep\u2019s fingers. I told myself to think about numbers. 11 sheep, 12 sheep \u2026 how many dead gnats were on my desk now? 20? 30? It was 1:45 a.m. 26 days left. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just 26, Fiona, you&#8217;re going to be OK.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">With only a couple sheets, a single pillow and two suitcases, the cavern in my stomach felt like my empty room. The pitch black, was a never-ending pit that I was slowly falling into. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just close your eyes<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. I was falling deeper.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I had built a dependency on familiarity, and now the unfamiliarity was breaking down my independence. Finally, out of desperation, I dialed the number I knew by heart. One. Two. After two rings, my mom picked up. It was 2:50 a.m. in Boston.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">&#8220;You&#8217;re not alone,&#8221; she reminded me, but the 850 miles of distance between us didn&#8217;t feel any closer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The next morning at Allison Dining Hall, a couple of familiar faces from the previous day greeted me like buoys in a sea of uncertainty. I introduced myself; as I shoved food into my mouth, the pit inside my stomach started to shrink.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Minnesota. D.C. California. Names and states filled my ears as I calculated distances and numbers. 566. 717. 2,148. They were just like me, miles away from home. I wasn&#8217;t alone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I&#8217;m still counting down, but now I wish the numbers would stop.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first night I struggled with homesickness, but friends and numbers helped me feel closer to home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":1702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[188],"class_list":["post-1006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experiences"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":188,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"cap-fiona23","display_name":"Fiona Zhou","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2955,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions\/2955"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}