For those of you reading this who don’t know, which would be a little strange because I’m pretty sure the only people who read what I write are my mom and all her Facebook friends, I go to college 3 hours away from my hometown. I’ve never been someone who’s gotten very homesick while being away for an extended period of time, having already done week long and half month long trips without my family, so before Columbus Day weekend I hadn’t even considered going home. Of course I missed my family and all that but, I did not even slightly miss my hometown. Syracuse, New York was a place with a lot of history for me and not a lot of it was necessarily good. I felt trapped by my past, I couldn’t escape all the mistakes I had made or all the things I had been through.
While Syracuse isn’t a small town there’s something about high school, mine specifically, that can make everything that is ever said or done related to you last forever. Whether it’s how bad you did on a test (Shout out to 36, a chant that’s still used at our high school games), who you’re dating (or not), or even stuff about your parents (I never had issues with this though, everyone loves my Mudder). It was so terrible that I actually felt the need to end friendships with people at my own school in order to make new, and stronger, ones at a different school 20 minutes away from my own.
When I say I don’t miss Syracuse, I mean I don’t miss the place not the people. This past break, though, I did go home to Syracuse. The reasons for going home literally were this: My birthday is coming up and it’s on a day I have work and class so I can’t be home for it and all of my roommates and good friends would be gone for the next 4 days. While those reasons are two very good reasons, I wish I could have a more meaningful reason like I couldn’t live another day without my mom or something like that (sorry mom but I definitely could’ve).
On this trip home I had one mission: see as many people as I could in the short amount of time I had. This semi-worked out but, I still missed a few people (Sorry Kenz!). I spent my first night with one of my best friends Sydney who is in her senior year of high school and ended my last with my youth group friends. I did everything from going pumpkin picking with my closest friends to having a hibachi birthday dinner at my favorite restaurant. I didn’t realize how much I had missed the little things my friends and I used to do like watching the sunset from a huge hill people called the “Top of The World”, or going to the Cazenovia Art Park to take artsy pictures with the artwork, or even just seeing Skaneateles in the fall time and visiting the lake.
Although home will always be a place I associate with bad memories, the people and little things about my hometown will always bring me back. Going home made me realize just how lucky I was in high school to have a solid group of true friends instead a large group of people who only kind-of liked me. It made me realize that even though something might be associated with a lot of bad past it can also hold a lot of good experiences. I went into this year hoping to never return to Syracuse but now am glad that I did and am excited to again for Thanksgiving break.