5/1/06
there is a line from the movie garden state that says something to the effect of: home no longer exists. but you still want it more than you want anything else. amber said it to me. and at the time she said it, i made a comment about how this is especially applicable to young adults, college-age folks, and the like. seriously, i did. in that kind of language. that was maybe two weeks ago.
fall of my freshman year, after october break, i wrote in a maroon-news article that the problem with having two homes is, wherever you go, there's always something or someone that you'll miss. two months into getting here, i believed that colgate was my second home. three and a half years later, it's more accurate to say it is a negation. a cancelling-out. as easy as it is for me to melt back into my college experience, i'm expected to leave--though some of my friends tell me i can't, i should fail and not graduate, i should get a job here at the barge or byrne dairy and move into an apartment downtown and postpone the rest of life indefinitely. or at least until every last person i know has graduated, moved, or died.
back in new jersey, there aren't too many expectations. everything is up in the air. if i didn't go back, they couldn't really say anything. i'm supposed to be grown up now, and that means i can go my way. it's easy to forget the ties i have in new jersey because for the past four years, i've been able to treat them as a break from my real life.
if i went back to my parent's house, i would learn to love it again, probably quickly. i would settle into my family, my friends, young life, REACH, church. i would temporarily forget about white people and academia and athiests and artists and small towns in central new york. and when the time came to leave again, to get a job or do that traveling i've been meaning to do, it would be this whole blasted thing again, on replay.
so now i carry this very painful thing: that wherever i am, i can't bear to leave. that every necessary change is an amputation.