It's like this. You're sitting alone at a picnic table at eleven o'clock at night eating sketchy packaged sushi--because you didn't eat dinner ...because you ate a celebratory pizza at four o'clock after your exam ...because you're a self-indulgent college freshman with no morals or concept of restraint--after walking to the most remote part of campus to study in the pitch dark alone, but sat on your phone for an hour instead. You've got one hand picking out the untrustworthy and rather-suspiciously-eraser-type-consistency crab meat from your sushi and the other hand navigating between the twenty tabs up on your laptop. From here, it becomes the time of night and the time of the semester when your brain starts to wonder what it should be thinking right now.

Okay, so pretend this is where you are right now. It is, unfortunately, where I am right now. Although I do hope where you are right now is far more glamorous because you have better self-preservation strategies than I do during exam season, stick with me for a moment. Close your eyes if you must.

What should you be thinking? Your first thought is that you have two papers and two finals hanging over your head and if you don't find time to spend at least 25 hours in the library tomorrow your GPA just might bite the dust, and that's your brain telling you all you want is to be out of here. But we're all complex little onions here, and in the next layer we get just a little deeper than that.

Do you really want to leave? Whether or not you're sad about leaving college and whether or not you're going home for the summer, your world has been split in two, and this one is going to escape you for a little bit. So while you're skipping plans with your friends to bang your head on the table in front of your essay and aggressively cursing the dining hall food and starting to resent every single study spot on campus because during finals so many people are at them, it's like, how can you appreciate the things you need to appreciate before you go?

There's actually, real-life good sushi at home at least. A bigger bed too. Exponentially fewer essays and a mother who will remind you to please wash your sheets; maybe a job waiting for you or a lengthy book list you won't entirely get to and enough time to do something stupid like impulsively buy a scooter and spend the day riding dirty with a friend.

But you're scared you're not going to be the 'you' you are at school when you get back home. There, see? You are such a complex little onion, full of deep moral thoughts about life. Be serious now, though: how much have you grown and changed in one year away from home in such outrageously positive ways? You aren't necessarily a different person now (as evidenced by the poor study habits and daily burrito cravings), but you are a better person--as evidenced by the quality of your friendships, the deliberate ways in which you act so as to compliment your future, and your newfound ability to do independent things like wash your sheets and take your allergy medicine and not roll your eyes when someone tells you something you already know.

The question is, however, is much of that positive change a consequence of your away-ness? Or rather, how much is a consequence of your here-ness?

You want to pack up your post-freshman-year-self and take her back with you in your luggage, but it can't possibly be that simple; because just like home-friends bring out the meme-loving side of you and college-friends bring out the crunchy side of you, being at home is going to uncover sides of you that you left at, well, home. It's going to bring up old habits. It's going to place you in situations with people who make your old habits die pretty hard.

And that's certainly something to worry about on top of your finals and packing and how you're going to keep the college group chat lit for four months.

Not to mention the fact that after four months, you're going to come back and be living in an entirely different place on campus, facing a brand new set of challenges, and wearing a new title on your face when you walk around campus like you know it. How on earth do you prepare for sophomore year in only four months?

The answers to these questions are not something I have, mostly because I don't even know what Hume's logical incompatibility argument is, much less the solution to how to combat situational code-switching. I'm just sitting here, alone at my picnic table at what is now midnight, pushing maybe-crab-meat around with my chopsticks and geekin' about the work that I have to do and how its completion aligns exactly with the completion of my freshman year.

It's scary I guess. But I suppose that's why I find it ultimately a blessing that I have to leave new stomping grounds for old ones. What I need more than anything is to take two or maybe twenty steps back to truly process and reflect on exactly all the ways I've changed in such a radically wild year.

It's a blessing, too, that I have such conflicted feelings. To be so torn between such incredible places, to have gotten such an opportunity for growth, well. I'll look forward to a bigger bed, but even more than that I'll look forward to keep feasting on this bittersweet, cry-laughing, up and down, hot and cold, gorgeously confusing blessing that is college. Finals or not.