Last week was the two month-iversary of graduation, and now that the initial shock of it all is finally beginning to settle in (although the nausea still hasn’t…), I find myself back to where I started from: a place that has been there through both kickball and keg-stands, both diapers and diplomas, and now is where I’m currently enrolled in the class “What-Am-I-Doing-With-My-Life-101.” Just like that, I am home again, back to my old bedroom walls who heard my oh-so-sassy-preteen self rant about how my mother wouldn’t let me wear darker eyeliner. I was lucky enough to learn and grow in a home that allowed me so much love and laughter, somewhere I once thought I could stay forever if the option was given to me.

So when I first came back for good, I didn’t want it to be different, wanted my home to rearrange itself back to the way I had always remembered it to be. But we painted the walls, and we got a new remote for the television. There are hardwood floors where carpet once used to lay, and there are new curtains hanging loosely over the kitchen window. Things are changing. Things have always been changing. And it felt like all at once, the home that in so many ways shaped me, made me who I was, wasn’t the home that I once knew.