Living five hours away from school, on a good traffic day, limits the amount of home visits I can make. I only come back for Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break. Growing up with the mindset that this is some sort of collegiate rite of passage -- living far enough away that I am forced to learn to live on my own -- I have been surprised again and again by the amount of people who think this is a struggle. People cannot believe that I am okay with it. After they finish interrogating me about why I chose to go to school so far away, knowing that this would be the inevitable consequence, they always ask the same question: is it strange to go back when you do go back? I am never quite sure how to answer this one.
It is great to go back home. Seeing loved ones after such a long time apart, visiting old friends and familiar places, and finally playing with the dog and cats again is an indescribable feeling. But it is strange in a way, because the time apart casts a telling spotlight on even the most minute changes. It is so rare that we see a gradual change as it is happening, but stop by before and after and it might as well be a completely different thing.
The strangeness comes, not from a change in my home or hometown, but from being able to see the growth I have made as a result of being so far away from home. At times, I feel like I haven't changed at all, and it's like I never left, but some things that used to be so familiar and commonplace seem like a walk through time. All of a sudden, you find yourself in your backyard where you used to have bonfires with all your friends, or in the garden where you threw tomatoes at your sister, and it is like you are borrowing someone else's eyes to look at it. You see and feel another life, an old life, and it takes you by surprise because you haven't even been gone that long.
You know how things are so much easier to handle when they are not your fault? Like how it's easier to leave something when your parents make you, or how you have less of a problem running when a coach says you have to? Understanding the change is sort of like that. The nostalgia would make me a lot more sad if I could stop time or prevent the change that time takes. But I wouldn't, even if I could.
So for all of you first time backers, or anyone considering a college far away, or who gets asked that question as frequently as I do, I hope this helps. It is time for us to make a new old, and know that someday we will be sad that it's gone and happy that it happened, at the same time. We will be happy that we did it, and proud to call it our past.
