By Ryanne Czarina Villegas
The end of the semester may be marked by the last exam or project, but the end of the semester is when you finally feel the quiet hum of the journey home and the stillness in the place where you began.
The bus or tricycle slows as a familiar landmark appears—that palpable buzz of the city, fields bathed in afternoon gold, children running barefoot along the roadside, and the faint scent of the sea carried on the wind.
By the time the gate creaks open, the noise of campus life has faded, replaced by the sound of home—something cooking in the kitchen, dishes clattering, and familiar voices you grew up with.
Campus life at Silliman is built on movement. Classes, deadlines, quick breaks, and nights that stretch past midnight. More often than not, meals are skipped and students run on coffee and a two-hour power nap. At home, however, it’s almost like time slows. After months of fast food and cafeteria meals, the first bite of home-cooked comfort feels like warmth returning to the bones.
The dining table becomes the heart of homecoming. It gathers everyone in the same space where stories and memories flow like water, and laughter echoes all around the room. Each meal holds the patience and care that long days in the dorm or apartment can’t provide.
The taste of home is more than flavor. It is memory, woven into the air, the sound, the pace of things. It’s in the way slippers scuff across the floor, in the mismatched plates that have seen years of family meals, and in the warmth of voices that rise and fall in easy conversation.
There’s a comfort in knowing where everything is—the cup that always sits by the window, the chair that wobbles just slightly, the faint smell of laundry drying in the sun. Even silence feels familiar here, filled not with emptiness but with belonging. It’s the silence of a gentle embrace, flooding your senses with sweet nostalgia.
Home carries its own rhythm, slow and certain. Morning light spilling through thin curtains, the hum of the radio from the next room, the sound of neighbors exchanging greetings at the fence.
Every small detail blends into a quiet kind of harmony, one that the heart recognizes before the mind can name it. You never really know how much you miss it all—the mundane things in your childhood, everyday songs that form the background of life, often unnoticed until you return to hear them again.
When you finally sit down at the table, surrounded by the people who have watched you grow, the meal becomes more than food. It’s a reminder that love can be ordinary—served warm, shared freely, and found in the most familiar of places.
The sweetest taste of home lingers long after the last bite. It stays in the memory of laughter, in the warmth of the walls, in the comfort of knowing that even when you leave again, a part of you remains where it all began.
