I didn’t apply to a single in-state college.
Two years ago, I was so confident in what I wanted — I had known since I was 12 years old that I wanted to get out of my hometown and see the world. I remember the night before I left to begin the 15-hour drive from Colorado to Indiana for my freshman year. The weeks up to it I had been questioning if I had made the right decision.
I had just had the best summer of my life and the thought of leaving my friends and family to move to a place where not a single person knew my name was terrifying.
Yet, that night, as I finished packing up the remaining items in my room, I knew this was just the first adventure of many for me. Not that it made it any less terrifying when I closed the car door and drove away from my childhood home.
I always thought it would get easier to do. I thought that by my junior year, I would be a pro at packing my life into tiny boxes and driving I-70, away from everyone and everything I love. I thought since I had made a life out in Indiana it would hurt less each time I left this home and went to my other. But it never does.
Maybe it gets a little more difficult each year because the time between when you get to come home grows longer. As a freshman, you can almost guarantee you will go home for Thanksgiving break and winter break. As you approach senior year, you have responsibilities in Bloomington; you have a job or an internship or maybe it’s simply that you are paying for a full month's rent, so it’s hard to justify coming home for three weeks.
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Maybe it’s because each time you leave you feel a little more grown up and it’s terrifying.
Or maybe it is simply because you know the feeling of homesickness that always seems to hit halfway through the semester.
Yet, each year, we do it again. I play “Tetris” with boxes in the trunk of my car and prepare myself to stare at 8-hours of corn and wheat during my drive through Kansas.
It never gets easier, yet we continue to put ourselves through it.
The thing that gets me through the hardest days of homesickness or the excruciating boredom that is the Kansas part of the drive is the knowledge that I am lucky to have something to miss. Homesickness, grief, longing; how lucky we are to get to experience love so deep that those feelings hurt so much.
Gentry Keener (she/her) is a junior studying journalism and political science.
