Thanksgiving Break – almost two and a half months since starting college – was the first time I’d been back in Maryland since August. I spent fall break in Buffalo with my best friend, and it really hadn’t been practical to go home anyway. At the time, though, I had wondered if I should have gone home, or if I should have wanted to go home.

But for Thanksgiving, I was excited. I had been anticipating going to see my high school’s fall production of All’s Well That Ends Well for months. I had messaged friends who were still in school, letting them know that I’d be back and that I’d be in the audience. I had messaged friends who were also coming home. I was ready to reunite and relax.

But I also had a weird feeling in my gut. What would it be like? To see all the people I hadn’t seen in months? To see the people I wanted to see and the people I didn’t want to see? To feel the pace of high school again?

To walk back into Hell?

Don’t get me wrong, I was fine in high school. I was always in the top of my class, I was in every honor society, I played sports, I participated in drama, I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine. I survived the International Baccalaureate diploma program in one piece.

I never hated high school.

But I was also tearing my hair out by senior year. Senioritis hit me HARD. I was ready to get out out OUT. I was done with the petty drama. I was done with the school administrators. I was done with the tedious assignments and graduation requirements. I was just done with high school.

I was ready for college.

I was ready to get out of the tiny program with the same 45 kids for the last four years. I was ready to live on my own schedule. I was ready to run my own life.

And after the six-hour drive from Ithaca to Edgewood, I was preparing to walk back into the concrete building that I had finally left behind.

It was strange. Strange to drive the same route I drove every day, at least twice a day, for an entire year. It was strange to park in the drama lot instead of the student lot. It was strange to keep my parking pass in the glove box instead of the rearview mirror where it had hung for months and months.

Stepping through the doors was like entering Narnia.

Everything was frozen in time. The people were the same. The building was the same. Same bad lighting, same scuffed floors, same electrical hum. Before the show, I caught some of my close high school friends.

We screamed and hugged, and talked a mile a minute about college and life and coming back home. We laughed and waved at our drama teacher, who visited us during intermission. We whispered during the show about our friends on stage – our stars, our children, our legacy.

And when the show was over there was more screaming, and hugging, and laughing, with the cast that we had left behind. Theatre was one of the closest communities I had been a part of, and it was the only part I really wanted to come back to.

Later in the week, I returned to the school at 7:00 in the morning. I wanted to catch some kids before school started, and I needed to pick up my IB diploma – the perfect excuse to see the current IB program victims, and some teachers.

When I came in, I got a lot of double-takes (not an oddity, given my blue hair, but this was a rather unique situation). Only a few people knew that I was coming. I got the chance to talk to the seniors, to reassure them that yes, your life sucks right now, and yes, it does get better.

I talked to the director of the program for almost two hours, catching up on current drama, and my new life at college. It did feel like I had a completely different life. I wasn’t one of them anymore. I wasn’t the same person she had taught English to; I wasn’t the girl she had taken pictures with at graduation.

I am so much happier.

I would never go back to high school. I think a lot of people look back on it with rose-colored glasses. And sometimes that’s me. But I also know that I was one of the thousands of kids that are overstressed, and sleep deprived, and powerless in high school. There was a lot of good, but there was also A LOT of bad and boring and unhappiness.

And now I’m unrestricted. I can do whatever the hell I want. I get to choose things, make decisions, hold power in my life, for everything that I do. Sometimes it’s overwhelming.

But I mostly feel like I’m moving forward – upward and away. I’m not trapped in that snow globe of high school.

I didn’t have to go back. I chose that. And I’m glad I did.

Not to say goodbye.

I did it because I needed to.

Because high school doesn’t stop existing when you leave. It still churns out class after class, dumping kids on their asses to either run to college,or to jump into the “real world.”

I needed to go back to make sure it wasn’t all a dream. Because sometimes it doesn’t feel real. I get to look around and feel so good about where I am now, that high school seems a million lightyears away. Not six hours.

I am grateful for how my high school experiences shape who I am today, both in classes and outside them. I went back not to say goodbye, but to say thank you.

To say thank you, but I’m still gone.

And that I’ll visit again, in the spring.