Oct 14 2008
Upcoming Fall Break - Retrospection
What is was like to return home last year : (some diary entry I dug up)
You come back home feeling like a writer, like you could articulate everything that happened because you’re trapped in such existential thought. On the forty minute drive home, you blare you music and sift through the night, like clumped pieces of flour, straining everything so that it may provide some truth. But no truth. You realize you just spent one entire evening “back home” spinning the truth so that your friends would think you’re successful.
Suddenly, that glob in the bottom of your throat, the one that feels of pride, fades away into dryness. You need a drink but you’re driving. You’re driving to a place where you can’t get a drink. What a laugh, you think even though you want to cry.
You feel embarrassment in where that pride used to be. You thought you could sit down with all your old friends and be the one with the ten guys and the fifty experiences back in Ithaca. You think your musical projects will impress them, because you’re best friend said “Look everybody! Look at what she is doing!” But what are you doing?
Are you so much better than them because you don’t have a television where you live and you were hit on by your ethics professor? Maybe not. The long drive home tells you that. But for a second, you thought they were impressed.
Home isn’t home when everything has changed, when the people smell differently and when the circumstances play out in a foreign way. You feel your love for the people you did, though it’s strained; you feel lust for the people you never considered in high school, even though they’re engaged. Where did this come from? When did it all change?
……….
I wonder if it will be different. Obviously, I’m not a freshman anymore so that whole new feeling to feeling differently about home, that’s all changed. But what will it feel like coming back now? It just feels like things change every time I leave and come back. And maybe that’s just a part of growing up.
