College is Weird

Going to college in the same town you grew up in is almost surreal. It's not like there is anything new for me to explore. I know even campus back and front. I am on first-name terms already with a few of the homeless people. I know the great places for food. When I walk around, I have already walked there. Yet, somehow, it is so totally different from before.

It's like everything just got painted a bunch of different colours. I don't mean like they painted grass orange or something. I mean different colours. Like colours that don't exist. It's impossible to imagine colours you have never seen before. Yet that seems to be what happened. Everything is the same. Every blade of grass, every brick, every bit of dirt. Yet it's all different. It's like something really subtle but at the same time really huge changed, and I can't put my finger on it.

I guess it's just that I feel like I don't have my home, over that way. My home is right in the middle of all this instead. But it isn't my home. It's like a hotel-room. I guess that's what it's like to be on the move or something, or be always moving around. Except I haven't moved. I'm in the same ol' Ann Arbour. Except Ann Arbour will never be the same to me again. I am now dwelling on the other side of State Street. And somehow, things are just different. I run into my high school friends now and again, actually. We wave, say hi, sometimes hug, and part. It's just so automatic.

"Matt! How is college!"
"Oh my god it's [name]! One of my very good friends is high school cool?"
"High school is just how you remember it"
"College is blah blah blah"
"Ha ha ha pretty neat, well I am going this way and you are going that way"
"That is true, so I guess I will see you some other time goodbye"

It isn't meaningful or even neat in any way. It just kind of is. I dunno. I can't really compare very well, since I haven't gone away for college. However, I will have to conclude that staying home is weirder. Not as stressful, perhaps. But still weirder by a lot.

From my experience of moving away (mostly stemming from my year-trip to England), you just give up everything and start a new life. You have to make all new friends. You have to use a map, or at least ask directions. You have to, well, you get the idea. When you stay where you live, you think to yourself, "ahh this will be easy, I know my way around and I already have plenty of friends living in town." Yet, somehow, it's hard. It doesn't really make too much sense, I guess. It should be a breeze, but I almost feel like I don't want to dwell on my friends, you know? That wouldn't be soaking up the college experience. It'd be cheating.

No, it wouldn't be cheating. It'd be fine, but difficult to maintain. Also, I'd be missing out on all my opportunities here.

It's so surreal! I walk around with no friends, knowing that, if I walked 15 minutes north-west, I would be treated like a God at my high school. Yet I can't bring myself to go back there, because it would somehow be so fake. Nostalgic, yes, but also fake.