I need to come home more

I miss the crew, I miss the chores, I miss the lack of food at my parents house. I miss my mom, I miss my dad, and I'm scared I might have missed the best of my grandma. I miss being home. I miss knowing well enough to feel bad if you've offended them. I miss talking about how much it sucks here. I miss wanting to leave, regardless of how. Amazing that how happened to be not one Ivy league school, but two. With less than a month to decide where I would spend the next year of my life, the second line on my resume, I hoped in my car and drove. The people at Harvard set me up with a grad student who I could stay with as I checked out the campus. For Penn my mom found an old family member that I could stay with. Then like a metronome I was non stop calculating, how do I figure out this highway, the off ramp, the friggin insane boston roads. What beers do people drink? Which program would work? Can I live with these people? The trip was full of solitary emotion wondering what was best, and the return was a wonderful collaboration of interest and thought from family and friends... Until my dad told me that I was going to Harvard. And the pistons beat the pacers, and we crowded into muldoons, and kevin juk showed up in royal oak for the finisher, and I honked the horn through the streets back to my place to pack my car. 4 hours later I started driving. I kept driving through summer school, through reflection papers, through student teaching. Then gowns, tassels, and pictures with people you swear you're close with. Of course you come home after leasin out your apartment and have problems the night life, you call, IM or myspace your new friends and you have recycled conversations with all your old ones. Something feels different more than the normal warmth of home, and deeper than the unannounced remodeling of my room. You go out with your old friends more and you have nothing to say. Your mom, your dad, grandma are getting along without you, with a little help from the doctors. And after another night of drinking, during your breakfast of contemplation you put your finger on it, "I've changed". You feel like you just told a momma joke to a kid who replies that his mom died. Nobody has said anything, and probably noone will, but I know I reak of it inside and out. Quietly, internally, you try to change, you try to find your own way to get it together, to get back to normal but you can't. You need a new place in a new city for your new job because you're driving to new york in a few weeks. Where, ultimately you will drive further away from yourself.