I miss you, but I don't want you back.

I’m heavy with the weight of missing you, my dear,
And I would tell you how but you’re too far away to hear.

 I'm eighteen years old. I graduated last year, knowing all too well that I would not see 90% of my fellow seniors ever again. For the most part, I was fine with it. We grow up, we move on with our lives.

But there are those few people who I know I'll miss. There will be those days when I can't focus on my English paper and wind up staring out the window of my dorm room, absentmindedly thinking about the people who used to mean so much and now are strangers.

I think there are different kinds of missing people. I miss my friends when I'm at college, but I know they're only a phone call away. They'll be ready to get Chickfila at 10pm our first night back. They might be far away, but I can still reach out to them. We've still got each other, and we both know that.

Then, though, there are the people who I lost along the way. There are the ones who used to sit up with me in my basement until 3am and now don't even know where I'm going to college. There are the people who used to ask me for advice about everything going on in their lives and now I don't even know if they still live in that house where we used to watch the stars from the backyard. I miss those people. I miss the friends I lost because of time and growing up. I miss the people I lost track of in the craze of endings and beginnings that took over the past 6 months of my life. I even miss the people who made a voluntary choice to walk out of my life as I held the door open for them.

But I don't want them back. I don't want to clear the air and dust off the memories for round 2. I think we idolize people from our past because it's easy. We don't want to remember the bad parts. There's a reason, though, why people come and go from our lives.

I'm eighteen years old, and I'm not the person I was when I was thirteen or fifteen or seventeen. I'm not the same person I was before I went to college. People grow and change, and we are allowed to decide when someone is no longer healthy for us, no longer supporting us. It doesn't mean they're a bad person. They're just no longer our person. I miss the people I've lost, and I would love to relive those memories, but I wouldn't repeat them now.

“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.”
 

It's beginning to look a lot like finals everywhere you go.

 The end of the semester is quickly approaching, and finals season is practically closing in around us. I have officially grown tired of wearing flip-flops every time I shower. There is not enough time in the day to finish all of my papers and projects and studying I should be doing. We are running low on snacks in our room (low is a relative term, but I can't eat any more goldfish or saltines so we're practically rationing the remaining ice cream).

Ah, college.

I'm currently sitting in the hallway of a building, waiting to go to English for the second to last time (I have never been quite so excited to be done with a class). I have a presentation tomorrow, an extra credit movie on Thursday night, a final on Friday, a research paper due Monday, a speaking final next Wednesday, and my last anthropology exam next Friday.

Oh, there ain't no rest for the wicked.

The weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break are like a strange and awful purgatory. Everything is due - papers, presentations, teacher evaluations - and there is so much to be done - studying, homework, packing for break. I'm counting down the days until I can collapse on my bed in my room at home and not move for six weeks.

It's all kind of bittersweet, though. My first semester at college has flown by and just as I'm starting to get settled into everything, we're taking a six-week intermission. I'm so excited to go home (hello, home-cooked meals and trustworthy showers) but I will miss my dorm and the people here. I'll miss my roommate and our aDOORable decorations (photo to the right). I mean, I won't miss living in the equivalent of a teenage hotel where no one sleeps and the smell of burnt Easy Mac fills the halls, but the people aren't half bad. It'll be strange not to hear people running up and down the halls at midnight or see everyone hanging out in the floor lounge after classes.

I'm ready to be home, honestly. I miss my parents and my sister; I can't wait to spend Sunday nights watching movies with my mom or taking my younger sister to get frozen yogurt after dinner. It's going to be nice to be home where Wawa is less than five minutes away and I can turn a phone call with my best friend into an impromptu visit.

College is amazing, but home isn't half bad, either.