Being Here

Being here, it's almost like things aren't so complicated. It's good to wake up in your own bed and not have to get dressed until one o'clock. It's good to see all the people you've been missing all year. It's good to see your family. And it's all good, until ten o'clock at night, when the coffee shop closes and all that's left here are faulty street lights to stare at. Then you remember that you wish you were back at college- when life starts at ten PM, and you had places to be and parties to attend. When life only circled around when your next test was and when you could stop studying. That's about the time when the simple allusion fades away, and being here goes right back to complicated. When adjusting to life back at home becomes a challenge and everyday is a struggle to find excitement in boredom. When the neon open sign flashes off, and you realize you aren't where you want to be. And this is the hardest part. Coming home and finding out how the person you changed into acts here. How your college self and your college reality adjusts to the home reality. While the homework list may become nonexistent and the worry about where the hell to park or what grade you made on your last test drifts away, you find yourself lost. Lost somewhere between college and home. And you can't figure out how to put who you are now in the shoes you left in your closet when you went away. It's the tearing down process before you can rebuild that tests us. We left this city one way and returned another, and we all know that the bubble here doesn't like change. We were all molded the way our high school wanted and now we come back trying to put a square in a circle. The truth is, I thought coming home would be easy. Just slip right back into a life with nothing to do and nothing to worry about. But when is it ever that easy? I go places that use to bring me comfort, yet now I walk through the door and get no sense of belonging. I thought it would be nice to have no math homework to accomplish, however the aching feeling that I have something I'm forgetting to do, doesn't go away. Being here, there is only a faint feeling of security. And right when you feel it, you look at the clock or the calendar or the lack of text messages in your inbox and you remember that you're not in Kansas anymore. We find ourselves staring at the far Emerald city without any idea of how to get there and there's no one around to sing silly songs with or help you find your way. It's just you and a million obstacles. That's the battle we are fighting, and we'll finish it someday hopefully. Maybe one day we'll wake up and be saddened that we'll have to leave again in the fall. Maybe. Or possibly, we'll just learn to live with our lives being crammed into the cookie cutter way we use to be. Or maybe we'll be comfortable being lost in the fields of flowers right before Emerald city that will make us fall asleep. And there we'll finally be able to find rest, numb from the feeling that we don't belong at home alone at 9:30 at night, and we can avoid the coffee shop that isn't 24-hours. We can turn our eyes away from what makes us miss college, and can dream of the day we will return. And that's what summer seems to be here. This town, our town, no longer having anything to offer us, but boredom and a Whataburger. And while we have our families and old high school friends, everything is so different to us. We are not who we were last summer, and being here will never be the same.