TEEN CENTER :: COLLEGE CENTER

FRESHMAN JOURNAL: DECEMBER 9, 2004

A Lot Has Changed

By Abha Bhattarai

I made the first countdown two weeks before Thanksgiving.

There were mornings when I promised myself an extra magazine at the airport if I made it through all of my classes that day. I began packing my suitcase at 2:30 in the morning one Saturday, ten days before I was supposed to leave. For a while, everything revolved around going back home.

I got home around midnight on a Tuesday night when it was 70-degrees in Texas. I'd boarded the flight from Chicago dressed in a tank top, a sweater and a heavy jacket. I stepped outside the airport in Austin and realized that I had already become a little out of place among the throngs of people, who, in flip flops and t-shirts, were dressed just like I'd been for the last seventeen thanksgivings.

That night, I spent time getting reacquainted with my mom's cooking and with my bedroom (my queen-sized bed had never seemed bigger). I relished the feeling of stepping on real carpet and showering without plastic flip-flops.

I'd gone home without knowing what to expect, but even then, I was a little surprised when I saw my friends and everything picked up exactly where we'd left off. We still met at Starbucks on Wednesday nights, we went to Megan's house to watch movies, Doug and I still watched Ken Jennings' winning streak on "Jeopardy!"

By Thanksgiving night, my house was filled with nearly 20 family members who had congregated from all over the country for my cousin's wedding that weekend. I'd traded in a suite of 11 girls for a houseful of family that was even more loud and excitable than a group of teenage girls. Returning to my dorm room at the end of the weekend and being surrounded by students studying for finals was much more of a quiet vacation than the one I'd had at home.

I'd expected the memory of my trip home for Thanksgiving to leave me miserably nostalgic for the two weeks I had to be back at Northwestern before Christmas. I'd already prepared a new countdown for my trip home in December before Thanksgiving had ended. I rationalized that, if nothing else, leaving Texas and going to college so far away from home has been worth it just for the excitement of going back. I've never been that excited about going home, and I doubt that I ever will be again.

But a lot has changed in the last couple of weeks and I've realized that I really do like being at college. I'm leaving to go home again tomorrow, yet somehow I'm not nearly as excited as I was a couple of weeks ago.

The sadness of having "left home forever" has been replaced with the comfort of knowing that regardless of how long I'm gone, my mom's salmon will still be my favorite, my dad's jokes will be just as corny and that my brother will still be trying to hide his stash of snacks from me. It'll be nice to have a break from school and to return home tomorrow, but it's also nice to know that I'm done with counting down the days left to get away from college.