Caroline

-monochromatic-

Everyone tells you what it’s like to go to college, but no one tells you what it’s like to come back from school. You never hear about the awkward feeling of leaving a place you’ve now made your own and returning to a place that used to be yours. You have to leave all of your new friends that suddenly know more about you than your hometown friends and live under your parents rules that you haven’t had for the last 4 months. Your room doesn’t feel like your room anymore, you live out of your suitcase, and your parents have begun having their own lives. You spend your days at home thinking about how different it felt when you lived here. Nothing really changed, the same mailman delivers your mail every morning, the high schoolers walk home everyday at 3:15 pm on the dot, and the Chinese restaurant down the street still makes the same crappy food. The only difference now is that you aren’t around to see it all happen anymore. You are no longer that high schooler walking home from school or waiting by the door to get a package from your favorite mailman. Then, you think about school. It’s fun because you don’t have parents around to tell you want to do or when to do it, all of your friends are there, and you’re constantly surrounded by people your same age. But under it all, there’s an emptiness here too. This can’t be home, there’s no home cooked meal or comfy bed or family to make fun of you. So if home doesn’t feel like home and school isn’t home either, where is home? No one told me going into college that during breaks I would feel like I don’t belong. No one warned me that my childhood home is no longer where I belong. I guess now I know what it must feel like for a bird to fly out of its nest for the first time, it’s terrifying.

"I just wanna look good for ya"