End of the First Year

Airport again.  This time going home for four months.  It's more like leaving home for four months, going to another home for 5 weeks, going to summer school somewhere completely different for two months, and then coming home for two weeks again before I go to my home home for another four months.  It's very hard to leave this city.  It feels like leaving a person.  I had a whole day to say good-bye to her and Melissa.  I found my favourite Thai food stand again.  They'd gotten a bigger kitchen cart and moved to a parking lot where it would fit.  I was very pleased to find that their reason for moving was their success.  Their pad thai is to die for.  I found gifts for the people back home that I wanted to give them to.  Don't tell my mama but I pretended to forget it was Mother's Day so that she'll be surprised that I remembered to shop for her.  

Saying good-byes has been tremendously difficult.  To feel such affinity for people I've known only eight, or in some cases four months seems strange logically, but is absolutely the natural reality of my life here.  I haven't gone around saying it until I was sure it was true, but there are people here that I love.  My three lovely girls, Lauren, Casey and Danielle; the ones I can't define, John, Melissa and Josh; and the ones that are simply truly my friends, Liam, Adrian, Ian, Annan, Annalisa, Katherine, Rachel, Morgan, Zoe, and Nathan... and even the lovely acquaintances that I can call friends, who would be too great to list.  And I'm sure I've forgotten many people.  

This year, aside from the details and specifics of my academics, I've learned how to live in a city without my parents, how to meet people that I will love, how to think in a completely new and wiser way, how to cut loose, how to focus, how to appreciate music, books and art on a completely new level and how to miss people.  I've devoted myself to my old friends and my new ones, my academics and my social life, my present and my future.  And I've grown so much.  When I think about who I was in August, it's not who I am now.  It's a smaller, more limited, less capable version of who I am now.  

I'm not looking forward to this summer, except for family, the friends I consider family, and two months of Arabic.  I plan to be much more careful about how I spend time with people at home and at summer school.  I am glad that it's only the summer.  

It will be strange to be home without grandpa.  He's been such an important presence in my life for the last five years, there's certainly a visceral hole now.  I imagine the sense of that will only be stronger at home.  It hasn't even been a week since I flew home to be there for his passing, but these last six days have been so full that it has been almost timeless.  

So, first year of college, thank you.