A Return, or an Arrival?
I must say, returning home for the summer was not the bombastically joyous experience I thought it would be. My parents asked me "What's it like it to be home again?" to which I couldn't formulate an appropriately sentimental answer. Perhaps it's because I had visited home often enough on the weekends that coming back for the summer didn't carry with it the emotional weight that tends to accompany homecomings. My nonchalance was no doubt tied to an instance that I'm sure will be hard for anyone in my family to forget, when I referred to "my home" in Seattle. My mom was genuinely scandalized, exclaiming "Isn't this your home anymore?" I hurriedly reassured her that yes, Portland was home, but I couldn't ignore the lingering sense of uncertainty in my answer.
For things had changed. I was not the same person I was when I left. I had new friends in Seattle. I had a new home. And the home that I had left in Portland was not the home I found upon my return. There were new buildings, new neighborhoods, and new people. Things were mostly the same, but everything felt different. Whatever life I had had before I left was gone now.
This surreal sense of loss was epitomized no better than in my old friends. In my senior year of high school, I had joined a group of friends with whom I'd developed such a strong bond that they had become a second family. But when we had left for college, all communication was cut off. We all became so immersed in our new lives that we never felt the desire to check in with each other.
Which made it all the more surprising that when we all came back for the summer, it was like we had never drifted away from each other at all. As if jolted into the past, our group immediately fell back into our original step. Our group dynamics were the same and it was clear that the bonds we had established in high school held strong.
For things had changed. I was not the same person I was when I left. I had new friends in Seattle. I had a new home. And the home that I had left in Portland was not the home I found upon my return. There were new buildings, new neighborhoods, and new people. Things were mostly the same, but everything felt different. Whatever life I had had before I left was gone now.
This surreal sense of loss was epitomized no better than in my old friends. In my senior year of high school, I had joined a group of friends with whom I'd developed such a strong bond that they had become a second family. But when we had left for college, all communication was cut off. We all became so immersed in our new lives that we never felt the desire to check in with each other.
Which made it all the more surprising that when we all came back for the summer, it was like we had never drifted away from each other at all. As if jolted into the past, our group immediately fell back into our original step. Our group dynamics were the same and it was clear that the bonds we had established in high school held strong.
And yet, I couldn't help but notice an undercurrent of strangeness in our reunion. We shared some of our experiences, but it became clear that speaking about experiences and actually having experiences together are completely different. It emphasized the fact that we all had distinct lives now. As much detail as we might include in our stories of college, there was no way any of us could actually know what that was really like. I began to look at them differently. They looked like my best friends, but I knew that they weren't the same people.
So coming back for the summer was a bittersweet experience (most of the bitterness was because of the 9 weeks I spent taking the entire Physics series at Portland State University, which entailed a 3 hour lecture every day, a 3 hour lab every other day, and an exam every Friday). I realized then that there's no such thing as a true return. We can never really go back anywhere. We can never go back to the way things were. We can only move forward and watch as everything that we once knew fades.
Disheartening? Yes, it certainly was, but I welcomed the fact all the same because I knew that surging ahead meant the melancholy would fade too. I was ready for summer to be over. I ached for my next year at UW. I was ready to keep moving.
So coming back for the summer was a bittersweet experience (most of the bitterness was because of the 9 weeks I spent taking the entire Physics series at Portland State University, which entailed a 3 hour lecture every day, a 3 hour lab every other day, and an exam every Friday). I realized then that there's no such thing as a true return. We can never really go back anywhere. We can never go back to the way things were. We can only move forward and watch as everything that we once knew fades.
Disheartening? Yes, it certainly was, but I welcomed the fact all the same because I knew that surging ahead meant the melancholy would fade too. I was ready for summer to be over. I ached for my next year at UW. I was ready to keep moving.