The More Things Change, The More Things Stay The Same (And Other Cliches)

It's the little things that get you. I didn't feel homesick until I saw a picture of home. It’s not even that good of a picture. Blurry, quick, taken via smartphone. But even a quick glimpse of my couch and my cat was enough to have me near tears.

The Great College Farewell was, ultimately, an anti-climax. There were no streamers, no huge dramatic farewell scenes, no marching band (which I think my sister would agree was a grievous error--marching bands should follow people about wherever they go). There were some tears and that was it. We said goodbye. We hugged. They left.

It didn’t really feel any different. It was like turning 18, or getting my driver’s license for the first time, or graduating from high school. A single event—a minute’s worth of time—doesn’t change you. It’s life that does that.

These milestones in life—I think we try to make them into representations of the black and white world that we want. We want goodbyes to be easy and finite. We want to be able to divide our life into neat little sections during which we can summarize everything that has happened to us—all the ways in which we have changed. We want to be able to pack our entire emotional life into a single moment, because then when that moment ends, we know that we’ll be able to let our emotions and experiences go as well.

We’ll be able to move on.

Goodbyes, in fact, do not work like that. People we meet take up a space in our minds that we never get back. They live in our memories of them. And people deal with these memories in all kinds of different ways. They mourn, they forget, they deny. But regardless or how much they want to or not, they all move on eventually. Time is tricky that way.

We have to find new ways to deal with the new challenges we face. The new people we face. Here at Case, I have to take initiative to get what I want. I have to make people see me. I keep having to encourage myself to leave my dorm, to go up to someone and say hi, to ask someone out to lunch. I keep having to remind myself that making friends is an active endeavor—that hanging out with people means you have to talk to them and invite yourself to whatever they’re doing first. New challenges.