Home

Going home is like living in slow motion.  There is no other way to put feelings in perspective.  You are looking at the place you grew up, lived for many years, and many months after college, thinking “I don’t live here anymore.”

You’re about to see the people that you love the most, you drive by everything that defined who you were as a child, a young adult, and you’re equally happy and terrified.  Am I going to miss it enough to want to move back?  Am I going to end up comparing every little detail of where I am now to where I am from?  Washington DC is very different than North Carolina so there isn’t much to compare.  They are so different you can’t get away with comparing, I love separate things about each.

Coming home, even though I have only been gone for a few weeks, but knowing I was leaving again, that I was grown up gone, was weirder than the first time I came back from college.  NC State was only two hours on a bad day away from Clemmons, I could easily come home for a weekend, I knew I was still in North Carolina, I knew I could go back whenever I wanted.  Granted, I can still go home whenever I want to now, but a day trip or heck even a 2 day weekend trip is practically impossible with a 6 hour drive.  So driving back into Clemmons this time was much more of a shock to reality than it ever was when I came home from college.  My room felt so empty.  In college my mom had it decorated a certain way, but it still felt like my room, but this time it was like in the movies, when all of your furniture, posters, pictures, books were all set up like they were when you were in high school, untouched, a sacred ground of youth.  I don’t have my room set up as “my room” in DC, because I am living with family friends, so I am living in somebody else’s room, why my room remains decorated, full of my personality… empty.

It will remain that way, because whenever I do eventually make enough money to live in a ridiculously priced apartment that doesn’t include a stove up here, my decorating style will be different, I won’t want to move all that heavy furniture to a different state, I won’t want to mess up what was so valued back home.  I want my room to stay my room; my little cave of nostalgia.

You are never too young, old, busy, too big for your britches, etc… to go home every once and a while.

Yes, she is wet on my bed. I just gave her a bath! I just wanted her close to me, wet dog smell and all.

Katelyn