Coming home from college is one of the strangest things in the world. Forget the fact that you are no longer in charge of yourself, or have the option to live by your own rules and you’re no longer living in an environment with people who are your own age, but you also meet back up with all the friends that you parted ways with when you packed your bags and left for college. People you thought you knew everything about - now people who have lived completely separate lives from your own.

You never expect things to change. Your high school best friends are the people you’ve known your whole life. They’ve stuck with you through your awkward phases and they know everything about you. They’ve watched you grow and develop into a whole new person, but then college comes, and everything changes. You become a new person. You grow up. Keeping in touch is something that happens on occasion, when time is available, and yet you think that when you come home that everything will be as it was before you left. But the truth is, you come home and it’s like restarting a story from the beginning.

There are people you’ve never met, places you’ve never been (and might not ever go) and stories that your friends know like the back of their hand - a whole new world and concept because even though you have your own world now, they do too. They live in a different place and have experienced different and new things and the only insight you have on this is the stories they tell you after coming home. The craziest thing is the fact that a year feels like a lifetime - an entire different lifetime than what your friends from back home knew before you left.

It was what you expected it to be. You knew that you were going to go off to college, you and your hometown best friends that you’ve had since you were in kindergarten were all going to go your separate ways to different schools across the country; all set off to have different lives and meet new people and make new memories - something set aside in a whole different world from what you were all accustomed to - but you still come home and expect nothing to have changed.

Your friends could be in new relationships and have these amazing stories to tell and memories to share and the fact is that you weren’t there for anything. Everything that you tell them or that they tell you is something that you have to imagine in your head, because the truth is that you don’t have a clue as to what’s gone on at their school or in their lives during the past year - other than what they’ve told you.

The fact is you each have your own life now. I guess you listen to stories, use your imagination and try to picture everyone that you’ve known for forever going off and living new lives - including your own.