Home

So I'm sitting in the library at the state college I went to for one whole year. Staring out the window at a campus covered in snow and having the weirdest feeling that this is all wrong. I shouldn't be here, I've moved on. I moved away, have a career, have a life outside this tiny town.

At the same time, it's almost healing to visit this place again. To be back where I was when my life was all possibilities. Where each new day could change my path forever. It's so much the same as it was then, and yet many small changes remind me that this is now, that I'm not 19. The campus green is gone, now buried under a building full of classrooms. Parking lots have been moved, sidewalks rerouted. The bells in the clock tower just chimed. And again I have to shake the feeling that this is still 1999.

Going home has the eeriest effects on me. I've already run into people that I went to school with. You have that strained 2 minute conversation about where do you work, where do you live, are you just home for the Holiday? You walk away not knowing if they were glad to see you, if it should evolve into meeting for coffee to really catch up or if they're thankful to be out of your presence until the next time you awkwardly bump into each other in another 3 years.

My 10 year high school reunion is this summer. It will be interesting to see how everyone hasn't changed and who ended up married to whom after we graduated and went our separate ways. I feel like my life is in order enough to not be embarrassed about comparing files with all the ghosts from my past. I can't hold a candle to the guy who is now a Super Bowl Ring sporting, Pro Ball Player, but I work for an international corporation and have a title that sounds important if you don't really know what I do. I know it shouldn't matter how everyone else turned out, that I should be happy just to be me, but who is really ever happy with that?