Ahh to move out of state for college, it’s a whole new adventure. No one knows you, and you’re in this new and exciting place, making new memories with new friends. Everything seems to be going great, you’ve made a sufficient life for yourself in this new place. Then break comes along and *BAM* you pass into the alternate universe that is your childhood.
You get back to your home state, driving past your old high school, seeing how nothing has even seemed to change while you were away. All those months of work, building relationships, making memories with your friends. They seem like they never even happened. Like it was all a dream.
You can feel yourself reverting back to your 16-year-old self, with the angst and the yearning to move out but this time you’re an adult and have already achieved a form of freedom. Yet as you get closer and closer to your home you feel all those accomplishments fall away. They might as well have never happened because that’s how it feels. And for as long as you’re there you live this alternate life where none of college happened, and you’re stuck there be it for a week, a month or a whole summer. It’s not until you step back into your seemingly new life, back on campus, with the same new faces the same classes and your same routines that you realize how much you have accomplished.
Then all of a sudden it feels like you’ve stepped back into a different world. As if you could fall asleep in one world and wake up in the other. They both feel dreamlike when you’re not in them. Almost like a distant memory, or a past life that you can feel inside of you. When you live in one life, your other life seems to have never existed, and it seems the phenomenon is caused by the fact that you’re creating certain memories in a consistent timeline with different people in different places.
So the memories that you can share and recall don’t overlap with all the same people. It gives this sense as if it didn’t happen because the people you’re with don’t have any memory of the event. And can’t relate because it happened in a world that they don’t reside in, so to them, it literally never happened. Of course, until you tell them, but to them it’s just a story that they’re hearing for the first time and not an experience you shared together.
Whether you can relate or not, I know for out of state kids, this seems to be what we experience when we go home.
