They say a college student can never really go back home, that things can never be the same – and maybe they can’t.
Age and change are hard things to deal with; they’re elements with their own agendas and courses of action. And they give everything a pace, even a town as small and so seemingly set in its ways as my hometown, a small eastern suburb of Cleveland.
But the pace and the progress of a small hometown are things you cannot see until the place is left and returned to again. In some ways, Chesterland, Ohio, has left me behind faster than I realized, faster than my desire to break free from it. Thus, sometimes I feel I am writing my memoir at twenty-one, looking back for what I remembered – what I thought would always be there in case I needed it – but finding something else entirely.
I realize that in my absence I missed much of a cycle that had always been in motion. I never noticed it during the 13 years I lived in Chesterland, but it makes me feel old much earlier than I expected. The situation is awkward, like I am looking backward for reassurance but finding only a jungle of unfamiliar things, grasping at the hollow straws of memories that shift constantly without warning.
It is a feeling where the pit of my stomach has become a barometer of loss, a telling symptom that something had changed, but in ways I couldn’t always place. My stomach, at times, knots with nostalgia for the Hometown, for the Old Way.
I felt it first on a visit home fall quarter for the Homecoming football game to see my sister who was on the court. I pulled my car into a lot I had parked in countless times, expecting to see old friends, sitting with their families, old teachers and mentors, but they weren’t there. They were off on their own paths in other parts of the country – busy with lives that radiated far from the old center.
The stands were filled with new faces, the names on the jerseys sounding hollow and foreign to me, like I was watching the events on television, looking awkwardly through a lens to a place I no longer belonged.
At first entry, even my bedroom at my parents house feels odd. In many ways, it is a tomb, a permanent home to all the things – the records, the posters, the memoribilia – that used to define me as a person to others and to myself.
At times it looks and feels like an office. The carpet is always freshly vacuumed, the garbage can always lined with a fresh plastic bag. My books, my CDs on my desk are ordered in ways I never intended. The sheets on my bed, too, are pulled so tight, making it seem that no one had slept there in days, months even.
Maybe it’s a symbol of the transition from kid to adult, from student to worker. Maybe it’s just a coincidence turned into something more monumental by another in a generation of students trained to constantly make those kind of implications.
But whatever those kind of comparisons mean in a larger sense, I never thought I would feel this way in the place I still call home, the place of my definition. At least not this soon. Years later or decades later, maybe.
For me, the past three years have been ones for retrospect: a look back to a past that slips away faster than I want and a realization that the future, whatever it will be, comes furious, whether I want it to or not.
But though the home changes, the pull homeward always remains, no matter what I feel or what I fear has changed. When I settle into the warmth that my home – more than any other place – offers, there is even an odd foreboding that leaving may have been the wrong decision. The bonds I feel with my family and who I used to be still remain, perhaps even more powerfully, though the situation is different.
At times I question why I have to see the world to feel complete, why I had to leave in order to live. At times I wish I never left. But sometimes I think I never really did.
John Ross is a senior in comparative studies. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
