There’s always that one year or two where you come home for breaks, and it’s so exciting. It’s exciting because some part of this place is still a part of you, and some part of you is still a part of it.

You come home, go to parties with your "friends" from high-school that you haven’t spoken to since the last time you were all in town. You visit with you high-school sweetheart’s family. You talk about how you only have a few years until you can be in the same place again. His group of guys and your group of girls go out to the same restaurants, hangout at the same houses. You more or less convince yourselves nothing has changed; you act like you still run this place… you pretend this is still your home and this is how you will spend all your breaks together until you graduate.

Then one day, one break or weekend visit, you stop kidding yourselves. You realize you’ve changed, your "friends" aren’t your friends unless you’re down the street from each other, and the guy you fell in love with isn’t the guy standing in front of you when you come home for Christmas. You finally admit to yourselves that this being your hometown is the only thing you still have in common with these people you’ve so greatly anticipated coming home to.

You’ve hit that year where coming home for break just isn’t all that exciting anymore. It isn’t exciting, because some part of this place is no longer a part of you, and the part of you that was a part of it is long gone. This town isn’t yours anymore. So whose town is it?

It’s their town. It belongs to that group of girls that were freshmen when you were a senior. It belongs to them for those few years they’re experiencing where they still run this place, like you and your friends experienced for a little while. You see them all out together, talking about their first semester of college, about how happy they are to be home to see their high-school boyfriend, about how they’re so thrilled to be back with their best friends.

Part of you smiles for them. Part of you looks at them and envies the phase of life they’re in. Part of you wants to tell them to hold on to this moment, because it will flee, but part of you hopes it doesn’t for them. You hope their friendships will last; that they will stay with their high school sweethearts, that you will see them out at this very restaurant you’re seeing them at now -- 10 years from now. You truly hope that the parts of them that are still a part of this place, of the people here, remain a part of this town forever. You hope that this town will forever be "theirs," as you become certain that it can no longer be yours.

It’s no longer yours, because you’ve found something that is more a part of you and who you are than anyone or any place ever could be. You have found yourself, and you have found that it no longer belongs in the place it once had. You have left pieces of your heart and your soul in so many new places, so many new people -- you just don’t have the capacity to be a part of this place like you once were, but that’s okay. That’s okay because they do. That’s okay because a group of high school friends will love this place like you did, like they did, long after you and whoever else has moved along. Someone will always be here, to run this town, to love it -- because it made them who they are -- just like it made you who you needed to be to become who you’ve become.

So this town may not be yours anymore, and it may not be theirs -- but at one point it was. And because it once was, you will all keep returning, watching the cycle continue from one group of friends to another -- smiling because you were a part of it; yet smiling because you no longer need to be.