Well, I am back. Back to the rigors of university life, back to classes, back to walking across the green, palm-tree speckled campus, back to overwhelming amounts of reading in an inordinate amount of time. Back to it all....
And yet, I have to ask myself: "What now?" I'm certainly not going to be jet-setting off to Paris anytime soon, nor am I going to be embarking upon any sort of adventure, unless they are of the academic variety of course. I think the tell-tale sign was when my faithful sidekick Lauren and I walked into a house party the first night back to college, looked around at the chaos unfolding beyond and realized: "Oh my god. We got old."
Alright, perhaps I am being existential. It is two a.m. as I write this after all. I may exaggerate slightly -- I've still got plenty of youth in me, to make questionable decisions and stay out until dawn. But still, walking around campus, looking at so many unfamiliar faces in this supposed-familiar territory, I feel like a stranger. Like when you go back to high school, and realize you don't actually know any of the girls that go there anymore, that they have long grown-up and moved away, to cook their own meals and marry themselves off to freshly-shaven men with scented aftershaves. When do those things happen? Is it somewhere in between paragraphs? In between Facebook feeds? How can I pin that down?
It is strange to be back. It is even stranger to talk to my host-family back in Alicante, that life continues over there. That it will continue to continue, and that, tomorrow, another fresh-faced girl will spend her first night alone in a stranger's bed in La Florida, spreading her unpacked things across the floral bedspread and missing the scent of home. How do I make all of these parts of life coexist in one place? Does anyone have the answer to that? Probably not.
I am going through the motions. I hope that my feeling of "home" comes back soon.
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