Discoveries of Coming Home

Last week, my mom described me as a “tourist in [my] old life,” and the description couldn’t be more accurate. I went to Hebrew school on Monday to catch up with the original Jew Crew, then a club meeting at my old school on Tuesday, and on Wednesday gave a presentation on the Innocence Project at my former teacher’s new school. Home for my first long vacation since leaving for school, I was met with some shock.

1. Showers are sub-par. Contrary to what you learned in John Green’s Looking For Alaska (shoutout to Josie!), the water pressure at boarding school isn’t so bad. In fact, when I shower at home, I’m disappointed in the water pressure of my own shower. Which takes me to #2…
2. Showering without shoes feels weird. What is this floor under my feet?!
3. But you can shower whenever you feel so inclined, and it is glorious.
4. You cannot get enough sleep. Ten hours tonight, ten hours the night before, eleven hours before that… and you’re still tired after dinner.
5. The animals are more annoying than you remembered. It’s easy to forget their flaws when you have cute pictures of their furry faces hanging over your bed at school. But in real life, your cat walks all over you when you’re trying to sleep, and your dog still growls when you enter the room. I’ve just gotta learn to accept the things I can’t change…
6. You have a bedroom to yourself! It’s weird.
7. You can hear traffic through your bedroom window. My mom says it’s because we have old windows; I say it’s because I’m used to being in the middle of nowhere.
8. Your old friends are still in school, and you can’t escape this nagging feeling that you’re playing hooky.
9. You re-discover how it feels to have zero obligations. I don’t know about you, but at my old school, many of the teachers took breaks as a chance to assign some extra homework. However, at my new school, teachers are not allowed to give work over vacations. It is a wonderful feeling. This morning I did the dishes simply because I had nothing else to do. (You’re welcome, Gus.)
10. YOU SPEND SO MUCH TIME IN A MOVING VEHICLE. This one deserves all-caps because it’s just so eye-opening. I didn’t realize how much time I spent driving from place to place until I got used to boarding school, where the gym is a seven-minute walk from my dorm and that’s about the farthest I go during the week.
11. There are no good places to run! I miss the wooded paths around my school. I found one similar path near my house, but it takes me ten minutes to walk start-to-finish. It’s either that path or the graveyard.
12. Most of all, though, I realize that when I come home, it’s as if I never left. I pick up right where I left off, and it’s a wonderful feeling.