The sadness will hit you straightaway. You’ll wonder if you made the right decision, if remaining in your dismal state was the best option. You’ll justify it to yourself; it’s cheaper, you’re close to family. But at least it would’ve been easier to distract yourself from your newfound absence at home if you’d gone somewhere entirely different. You won’t allow yourself to think this for long.
Often, you will feel alone. You will be perplexed by the ease with which your peers seem to make friends. You’ll see groups of them walking together out your window, as you lay in bed on Friday nights. Although many of your friends moved along with you, they still won’t invite you to a lot of things and you won’t be surprised; you’ve always been the nonessential member of the group. You will wonder what’s wrong with you, however, when the old woman sitting next to you on the bus moves away from you as soon as there’s an open seat; the new city will feel cold.
You will hope your family misses you. You’ll text your little brother often, and be more than slightly upset when he never replies. When your roommate asks whether you have a good relationship with him, you will say yes, but, now that you’re thinking about it, you don’t know if that’s true. You’ll think back to how sad you were when he said he didn’t want to help you move, and that even though he caved and ended up helping, he complained the whole time and left earlier than planned. This is why you cried when your family went back home after you moved in: not because they were leaving but because they didn’t want to stay.
When you visit on weekends you will be struck by how your mother treats you. She will make your favorite food every time you come home and soon it will not be your favorite anymore. You will notice her investment in things for the first time and it will bother you: her commitment to the evening news, the way she gasps when it is announced that fourteen people in Syria died last night. This will cause you to recall what your professor said about TV news being mere entertainment, and when you mention this to her she will say yes, but not this, gesturing to whatever’s on.
You’ll find it hard to determine, while walking through your hometown, why it is you like it there so much more than where you moved. When you ask yourself if it’s because it is a genuinely nice town, you are doubtful. And you’ll suspect that even if you moved back nothing would improve in your life, that your vague unhappiness would endure regardless of location. And then you’ll realize that you don’t recognize the people who live there anymore, it’s as though a new mass of people migrated in as soon as you left. At this, you’ll feel strangely territorial.
On these visits, you won’t want to leave. But at the same time, you’ll know that staying will just cause the pain to deepen; from your newly detached vantage point, you can finally see the stagnance of it all. For the first time in your life you’ll be able to gape at the melancholy all around you, the kind of quiet sadness that persists no matter what anyone does in their lives. And no one will be around to witness the reaction you cannot suppress.
