Lilly

I leave in a week. The plane tickets are bought, the paperwork all taken care of. In the next few days I’ll be packing up my life again, some smaller subset than what I brought with me to college. It’s only ten weeks away from home.

But home feels odd enough as it is. Not the people, or the household, as not that much has changed in my months of absence. But there’s a feeling, sitting in my room still pristine from when I left it, that I don’t quite belong in this place the way I used to. Like I am not whole outside of my work. And I think that is natural. It’s not a slight to anything here, just a missing piece of who I’ve now become.

My mother nurses my plants back to health after I neglected them during finals week. I stress over my lack of professional clothing, not knowing what kinds of presentations are ahead of me at my internship. I go for runs with my best friend while we’re both still in town, talk to a professor at the local university about summer projects and go home with a new mountain of textbooks that I’ve been mostly too tired to explore. I don’t sleep well. Longer, for sure, but generally worse than I did at school. I do remember a dream for the first time in ages. I count that as a good thing. I correllate it with thinking more and running more and trying more at life.

But lazy summer is a more difficult time than it used to be, like the long weekends that I so hated while I was at school because I couldn’t be in class. And now it’s like I’ve leveled up and am doing more, harder, not-being-in-class. It sounds ridiculous! Who would miss that? But I do. And it’s not the same to be learning on my own. I miss the environment. I miss being in a place of learning. My internship will help. Maybe the general relativity and differential geometry textbooks that currently reside on my bedroom floor will be able to fool my brain into thinking that I am elsewhere. But for now it feels strange. I feel unwelcome inside my own head. It is a confusing place to be. ♦