The countdown I started on my whiteboard in my dorm room finally reached "Home!" today. The time had come for me to leave behind communal living, mind-numbing lectures, and shitty cafeteria food for five days and go home to friends, family, and the largest face stuffing festival in the United States: Thanksgiving. Thank you, pilgrims!! Not only are you helping increase the obesity levels in this country on a single day and initiating the killing millions of innocent turkeys (I should point out that I have been a vegetarian since the womb), you are also bringing me joy in the most abundant amounts.
For the first time in three months, I am home, and it feels oh so wonderful to be here. Pulling up into the driveway of my house produced rather strange feelings. No doubt I am thrilled to be home for a week, but it also seems rather foreign. My family continues to live here, but I am not there to witness it. It is strange to think that life happens here everyday, but I know nothing of it. Technically I don't even live here anymore, yet I still can't call Mertz (my dorm) my home. Nevertheless, I walked into the undeniable comfort of my house, making a beeline to greet my kitties who had congregated in the kitchen anxiously waiting for my arrival. And, well, I was so relieved to have arrived.
Within ten minutes of me being home, I get a text informing me of the plans for the night. And here is where coming back to Ohio gets even better...even better than seeing my cats! Shocking, right?! After three months, or one fourth of an entire year, I am on my way to hang out with my friends. My Ohio friends. The closest friends I have. The people I have not seen in far too long because the distance between each of us is incredible.
If you look at where my closest friends chose to attend school, your eyes would have to dance back and forth across the map of the United States because we're partying all across the USA. We range from all the way out west in Seattle to all the way down south in Georgia and all the way back up north in New York. No two of us go to the same school. Needless to say, it's kind of difficult to hop in a car and drive down to Georgia from Illinois on any given weekend.
Seeing everyone tonight had a similar sensation as when I came home. Although we all try to keep in touch as much as possible, I have no clue what is really going on in my friends' everyday lives. What do they do in their spare time? Who are they hanging out with? Where do they go on the weekends? Everybody has their own almost secret lives that I will never truly be able to understand simply because I am not seeing them everyday anymore. We can talk and share stories, but there are empty faces and places that I can only attempt to imagine. If we are all shaped by our experiences, then we have all become completely different people. Nobody's "college lives" are the same, whereas in high school we were all stuck in the same place doing pretty much the same thing.
Even though we're all across the country, we all are nodding our heads like yeah and moving our hips like yeah. Not to mention this unfortunately captivating song is played at every single party across the country. For this week, though, we will have congregated our party to in the UA in our hometown suburban setting, and I couldn't be more thankful.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment