You sit on your bed, grab your phone to check your notifications. Your phone reads, "Two hours, forty-nine minutes to drive home." Pause. Home?

It's hard to remember exactly when it happens or when things start to change. You might wake up one morning and not recognize the bed you're lying in, the white walls, or the view from the window that you almost forgot was there. People always talk about leaving home and how saying goodbyes hurt, but no one ever talks about coming home. When you're away for years at a time, or even just months off and on, your home eventually stops feeling like home. People prepare you for this huge transition of leaving, but the real transition is in your return.

When I left for college, I was ready for the transition. I had been waiting to leave home for years because I knew that I could do so much more if I just left. I thought this would be the biggest transition and adaptation I would have to make. Little did I know, it was the first of many. Nobody ever tells you that the next of those “many to come’s” arrives several months later.

Transition knocks on your residence hall door as you're still packing away the past months of your life. Transition reminds you that you're not going to see your new found friends for the next few months. Transition reminds you that the faces you will see when you return to your hometown aren't friends anymore, but rather strangers with familiar faces. The real culture shock is not in leaving home, but rather it is your return home to people who do not relate to you. You can't figure out what home is. Home is where the heart is and your heart is with so many people. You're two hundred (or more) miles away from people you care about, but also several feet from people of the same kind. You experience a loss of freedom when your parents tell you that you cannot stay out after one in the morning anymore because you are living under their roof. Also, your dog would bark, waking everyone up, and your younger sister has to get up for school in several hours. You don't get to see your best friend every day because (s)he lives anywhere from 10 blocks in a poorly lit neighborhood to 10 hours away from you, instead of in the other room. You live out of boxes and suitcases because you don't bother unpacking anymore.

Transition reminds you that you're not really home because you can't help but follow your mom around like the awkward friend at a party who doesn't know what else to do. The transition will greet you with another shock when you expect to be gently pulled into a warm embrace, but instead you are greeted with an icy chill from your best friends who chose to attend the local college or to start a family. You start to realize that you cannot keep fueling these burning bridges. There is no sense is burning yourself when you are the only person trying to save it. Transition reminds you that you're technically where you're supposed to consider home, but you don't feel any attachment to it. You're homesick for a temporary place that was never really a home. That temporary dorm or apartment was just another station on the journey, and so this is what your hometown must be as well. Why else doesn't it feel like home?