“If I don’t get some fucking sleep, I think I’m going to kill someone.”

A deluge of heartwarming sentiments regarding murder, lack of rest, and general airplane-induced discomfort (you know that feeling when your ears don’t pop for several hours following a flight? Yeah, that one) feasibly gave our taxi driver second thoughts about picking us up from the Dublin airport on an unconventionally cloudless Friday morning. So, naturally, he charged us 55 euro for what should have been a 30 euro ride – if that – and probably judged us the whole damn way.

It was the beginning of an adventure.

But if you are ever granted the privilege of seeing your favorite city doused in sunlight at the promising lip of the fabled senior spring break, a simple absence of sleep loses its capacity to dash your spirit.

The difference between my latest visit to Ireland and the two that came prior is the promise of a future. No longer is Dublin a far-flung vacation destination; Dublin is home for the next four years.

The atmosphere crackled with ineffable potential; all the abstract elation regarding my acceptance to this distant school was at last confronted face-to-face. Here I was, standing at the imposingly exquisite gates of something adjacent to my evolving definition of home.

Ireland has given me pause when it comes to this rapidly changing idea of a home. I always imagined home to be the roof under which my family raised me, the place where I dropped my backpack after school, where I snuggled under my covers and fell asleep each night. Home always existed in my mind as the location in which I grew up and the one where mom and dad would always be waiting.

And yet, Dublin feels a great deal more like home than my current residence ever has.

The feeling has nothing to do with where I was brought up, but it has everything to do with happiness.

My favorite definition of home is as follows: “a place where something flourishes.”

The denotation rightfully neglects to acknowledge home as a permanent place of residence we’re convinced to believe familiarity and comfort should equate to. If I’ve learned anything from my multiple visits to Ireland and my few excursions around Europe, it is that home is more a sensation than it is a location.

The AirBnb apartment several friends and I rented for my most recent trip to Dublin was scarcely large enough to be regarded as an apartment. It was a glorified closet. The stairs, which fed directly into the “kitchen” (also known as a wall with some cabinets and a mini fridge attached to it) upon opening the shoulder-width door frame, led squarely up to the bathroom door on what could be called the second floor, if we’re being generous. I would more readily call it a loft-like upper compartment to a bunk bed.

If you stand in the door frame, you can see the entire apartment without having to look around. It’s all within ten to twenty feet of the threshold.

Long story short, our living conditions were cozy. We loved it.

We spent the majority of our nights sleeping in our closet apartment and several other nights couch-surfing among new friends. I wouldn’t classify any of the places where I slept as “home,” but I was at home throughout my entire trip.

Home was the bus ride from Dublin to Maynooth, where the seats were heated and I rested my head on my best friend’s shoulder.

Home was a dew-drenched wooden bench bordering the verdant green field central to Trinity’s campus, my scarred blue notebook in one hand, a ballpoint pen in the other.

Home was a 2am taxi ride with strangers, speaking broken French, whizzing past Dublin suburbs in the untouched darkness of early morning.

Home was waking up at noon and walking cobblestoned streets to our new favorite cafe, nestled between a restaurant and a pub in the city center. Home was the iced chai served fragrant and sweet, the soup served thick and warm.

Home was standing in the back of a musical performance, hearing the smooth reverberation of a slow melody, the clinking of cocktail glasses, the tangle of Irish brogues and the breath on my neck.

Home was the top of a craggy cliff face in Howth, sitting at the precipice without an agenda, two feet scraping the edge of the world.

Home was every deep meaningful conversation with someone new.

Home was tripping on pavement.

Home was Guinness and tobacco smoke.

Home was climbing a fence in the dark.

Home was getting to spend unlimited time with my best friends, whether I met them years ago or just that day.

Home was feeling unmitigated happiness and fulfillment in my bones.

In my life, home and happiness have become essentially the same.

Home is not a static abode like we are made to believe it is. Home is an intangible, moving target, and if you are ever lucky enough to hit the bullseye, wildly unattainable as it may seem, you’ll unravel how intimately enmeshed happiness and home truly are.

They are, in fact, much the same thing.

Home is wherever you bathe most deeply in happiness, wherever you find yourself sinking and swimming all at once, laughing and crying and rejoicing, whether that be in one place or in a hundred. Home is not linear. It is not sedentary. It does not have an attic or a basement, but rather two feet ready to run, two hands poised to write, two arms to embrace, one pair of lips to kiss.

If I’ve learned anything from my deficiency of sleep over the last week thanks to what some could call a “full immersion” in the Irish experience, it’s that there are a hell of a lot more layers to what constitutes the happiness I claim to understand.

Yes, Dublin is soon to be a version of “home,” but it is so much greater than the elucidation of home I once trusted. My new understanding of home is portable.

I know I have the capacity to keep it with me always, to take it along on airplanes and trains and wherever else new experiences of happiness may find me.