Dear Grand Junction, Colorado,

Finals are coming soon, the walls are blank, the closet is empty and the car is packed and full. I will see you soon and I am not ready to. Honestly, I am not ready to come home and I honestly don't think I will ever be.

Oh, Grand Junction, I didn't really miss you. I missed things about you. I missed my friends, my family, my dog and your mountains. I didn't miss the lack of culture, acceptance and the lack activities to do on the weekends. When I return home, I will be reunited with amazing old friends, but I will be forced to leave new ones behind. These new friends, I spent prolonged amounts of time together every day and now coming home I will only be able to see them except through a computer screen every now and then. It will be hard and far from enjoyable.

Grand Junction, I outgrew you and I have changed and so have you. I went to a bigger city, where there were poetry slams, concerts, culture events and acceptance. At college, people accepted me with open arms, embracing my poetry, writings, indie music, and love for literature. I discussed post-modernist literature and hegemonic masculinity at breakfast and then I discussed human ethics and Aristotle at dinner, and I will miss that for three months. I will be deprived of my speaker series, professors talking about the fallacies in politics and professors excited to talk about Virginia Woolf or the Baltic States. I will sit alone reading Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and contemplate the theories about life. When I bring these theories, thoughts and knowledge back home will they be accepted with open arms?

I fear coming home from college, because I know that everything has changed and the way that life was will never be the same ever again, which scares me to death. My home is no longer my home, and my hometown is now a faint ghost made up of memories that I made with eighteen years of life. Will the streets I once walked down with friends still hold the same memories or will these streets be completely transformed? The familiar faces and people now only strangers to me now, it seems trivial going to my hometown when I will long all summer to be back at school, my new home.

Grand Junction, it's neither your fault nor mine. Leaving is to blame, once you leave you can never go back and expect the same thing. Relationships change or are abandoned, you mature and forget the trivial matters of your childhood, you face adulthood and the real world. All of this means that your hometown will become a tattered scrapbook of your old life that you casually look through during the holidays or when you come home from college.

Grand Junction, brace yourself, I am coming home. I'll brace myself too because home isn't home anymore.