Two Worlds

Quotes from Andrea Lewis' Facebook Note:

"A year has past and now we stand on the brink of returning to a world where we are surrounded by the paradox of everything yet nothing being the same. In a few weeks we will reluctantly give our hugs and, fighting the tears, say goodbye to the people who were once just names on a sheet of paper to return to people that we hugged and fought tears to say goodbye to before we ever left. We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends. We will go back to places we came from and go back to the same things we did last summer and every summer before. We will come into town on that same familiar road, and even though it has been months, it will seem like only yesterday."

"Then you realize how much things have changed, you realize the hardest part of college is balancing the two completely different worlds you now live in, trying desperately to hold on to everything all the while trying to figure out what you have to leave behind. In the matter of one day's traveling time, we will leave our world of living next door to our best friends, walking across campus to eat, instant messenger, 8:00 classes, and perpetual procrastination to a world that will seem foreign to us despite the fact that we have lived in it for nineteen years."

This says a lot. I'd just like to add that the move to Florida is simultaneously making this easier and harder for me. Also that all of our friends went through the same thing, so there's that aspect of it. And it probably helps me that I've come back home from things that I felt had fundamentally altered my being only to find myself settling back into the old habits remarkably quickly, holding only traces of my 'life changing' experience. (But even a small change is a change.)

This whole situation, while true, is pretty darn universal and stereotypical and I don't know how much more I have to add to reflections on it. But there it is.