Now that I've been home for a month, I've started to remember what my small town feels, smells, and looks like again. I don't think I'll ever get over walking into my house and feeling like a stranger who is walking in for the first time, taking in smells I never knew were there. Home feels so different after you go to college. You don't realize how much you've grown and changed until you pull into the driveway you've pulled into a hundred times before, and feel distant. You don't realize how 'home' can mean so many things at once.
That 'home' doesn't only have to mean the place where you grew up. 'Home' can be the tiny cramped dorm room filled with girls you've only known 9 months or the small studio apartment that can somehow fit all of your new friends. 'Home' can sometimes feel like none of those places or all of them at once. No one prepares you for that when you leave for college. People give you all this advice about how so much will change, but no one ever describes for you how 'home' won't feel like home ever again.
Home doesn't mean your childhood bedroom anymore, and it took me a while to realize that's okay. It only means I'm growing and learning. After I came home from college after my freshman year, I remember feeling so guilty for missing school. I thought I was supposed to want to come back to my hometown and I wasn't supposed to fall in love with my college town. I remember expressing this to my mom and she said she felt that exact same way when she came back from school. She felt like a stranger in her own house, that the furniture felt foreign, her blankets not as soft as they used to be.
Don't get me wrong, I love being back in my small town. I love all the memories this town holds for me, but they feel like distant memories now. This small town holds my past, but not my future. And I now know that I shouldn't feel guilty or saddened by this. I think this is how we cope with growing up and moving on. I think it's the consciences way of letting you know you are becoming our own person. You are starting a new life, in a new place, with new people.
Time has a funny way of passing by you and staying completely unseen. It keeps moving faster and you don't notice it until another year has passed and you don't recognize the new person in the mirror.
