COLUMN: Home? You really can't go back home again

From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '99 From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '99You're probably not reading this. In fact, you're probably curled up somewhere in your Long Island (let's be open-minded, maybe it's New Jersey) home, cuddling up in your warm, clean sheets. At around noon, you'll stumble out of bed, still bleary-eyed from the one night's sleep, which was supposed to make up for a semester's worth of sleepless nights. You'll stumble into the kitchen and open your refrigerator. And then, it will truly feel like home. The one thing that can distinguish home from college -- a refrigerator that doesn't smell like the slowly decaying body of roadkill. Home, sweet home. Like the American Red Cross, home is the one place that can give food to the hungry, revive the weary and calm those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But just as soldiers return from war to find home slightly altered from the way they left it, so too do college students find home different from the way it was before school started. Thomas Wolfe wasn't kidding. You just can't go home again. Some aspects of home are constants. The way your room smells a certain way. The way the toilet paper in the bathroom always has the roll coming under instead of over. How your mother will always make pot roast at least one of the nights you're home. How you can take a shower without flip-flops or worrying about who else's grimey feet have been in the shower before you. How your relatives will always ask you how you're going to make a living with THAT major. How you don't have to worry about not having clean underwear for the next day because there is ALWAYS clean underwear when you're home. While the list of constants goes on and on, there are other aspects of home that you had always thought would be the same, but ended up changing irrevocably. At college, we assume that our high school friendships will freeze in time and that at the moment of reunion our relationships will remain unchanged. But the sad part about coming home is realizing that the friends you associated with home seem more like a distant Motel 6, a casual one-night stopover. Superficially, it's easy to accept the physical changes in our friends and to enjoy gossiping about them. "So-and-so never had a nose ring before!" or "Wow, she's lost a TON of weight" or "When did she become a lesbian?" But upon returning home, we also realize that there are worlds we know that our high-school friends have never known, people we want to gossip about whom they've never heard of and memories to be recounted in which they had no part. There is a nebulous, fuzzy space that forms somewhere between the moment you part with your high school friends and the time you return home. Somehow, these friendships that you thought time and distance could never change have been changed by these very factors. And somehow, before we can really notice it, Penn has become more of a home to us than our hometowns. The gray area, in which home is neither completely where we grew up nor completely Penn, is disorienting and unsettling. We are groundless, floating precariously above two worlds, not quite sure which world we really belong in. But it is also empowering and exciting. Maybe it's not so bad when we can't go home again. If it doesn't hurt us, it will only make us stronger. If nothing else, it will allow us to embrace our independence, and the years of our lives when nothing ties us down. People say that the hardest thing about going to college is going away and being on your own. But perhaps the even harder thing about going away is coming back.