When you go to school far away from home, you learn to adapt to what seems like endless things. You deal with the obvious homesickness and missing little things like your favorite foods and obviously your hometown friends. But sometimes things change and creep up on you quietly. And you don't notice them until all the other little things blend away.

You're 20 and in the summer of your adulthood, physically and metaphorically. You're in this strange limbo that you've been never really been in before and most likely never will be again after college. You have these two full and functioning lives, eight hours apart. A home where you spend half of the week crying over midterms and the other half scattering shot glasses all over your kitchen with your closest friends. This home is yours to ruin, yours to clean, and it's just plain yours. You leave on your own agenda and come home for the night whenever you please – and you don't run into every relative every time you go to Costco. It's you that has to fill the fridge and vacuum the floors after a night out. And you are granted with this appealing freedom that isn't found elsewhere. We cling to this feeling because it's new and different, and if you grew up in a town anything like mine, that's necessary for mental sanity.

But then you have your real home. Is it even right to call it that anymore? This is the place that crafted you into the person you are. The people inside it are the ones that have watched you grow and change for a decent part of your life. This is where you don't have to worry about the food in the fridge or running into the snot nosed girl that dropped her drink on you at a party. It's comforting and brings us all back to our roots, to the feeling of being nurtured which is something that we don't get for the majority of the year when the warmest hug we get is from a cup of whiskey on a Thursday night. And we sit around with our hometown friends, seeing all the little things that changed when they all go to school at the state college and you've been hours away, with a completely new group of friends and experiences. And you realize as you tell your stories from school how now one really listens because they don't know these people. But you do. And you have years of memories with the people in front of you but important milestone ones with the people hundreds of miles away.

This feeling puts us all in a strange position. We value each place deeply and somehow always miss the other when we aren't there. We miss the freedom of school when we're home and the comfort of home when we're at school. And it's this rotating cycle that keeps going every winter break and every summer vacation you notice yourself feeling more and more distant from your hometown home. You come back after months of being at school and realize they put up a high rise on your quiet street. Your guy friends from high school that you thought would always be there are suddenly too cool and too frat to care anymore. There will always be a few good friends and those are irreplaceable, but some things changed and you can feel it in your bones. We cling to the people from our hometown and turn them into this glorious piece of comfort in our minds but you can't turn people into homes. We have to accept this new stage in our lives for what it is. We have these two wonderful lives, ones that many people aren't lucky enough to experience. Cherish the time with the people that cherish you, whether it be at either of your homes, make it all count. Your parents aren't going to be around forever and the house you grew up in will one day probably be sold and it will all change again. But you're okay with change because let's face it, as scared as you think you are, no one moves 8 hours away and is in fear of a new adventure.