When you leave for college, you create a new home. You have a new bed and friends that act like your new family. You have new responsibilities similar to the ones back home, but none the less the things your mom and dad use to do, you now do. You have a new routine that doesn’t include answering to someone or asking to go out with friends to eat. You just go. You call this new place home, but your heart still longs for the old home. The forever home. Not so much the house you lived in, but the people that made the house a home.
You may have a new family made up of friends, but you’ll walk back to your apartment alone instead of going upstairs to your room, which happened to be next to your sister’s room. There’s no more laying on each other’s beds watching dumb YouTube videos or laughing about everything until 2 am. Instead of waking up and going downstairs to eat with your family on the weekends or dinner together every night, you walk to the caf with your friends and you don’t get to go to your room and cuddle with your dog anymore.
Then you find yourself offering to help your sister with her homework when you come home because she works all weekend and the only time she gets to be home is spent doing homework or sleeping. So even though you would rather go out and do something, you offer to sit on her bed and help her with English, which you suck at, just because it means time with her. You eat every meal at the family table even if no ones with you because you miss sitting there every night to eat and chat about your day.
College may be great and be full of new, great experiences and a new home, but I will forever long for the family I was given and the house they live in. I will forever miss my home.