Homecoming
February 14, 2024
Writer: Ava Londa
Editor: Chloe Robinson
The sun sets at 4:41 PM in suburban New York this time of year; each hour of sunlight feels like a gift. I'm engulfed by the relics of my distant childhood. It’s been only four months, yet I feel like a mere passerby, a guest in what used to be my safe haven: my bedroom.
My bedside table drawer holds memories of the last 7 years of my life. Old photographs I printed at CVS are scattered under books from English class I never returned and birthday cards from ex boyfriends. I leave Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird where it is, the handwritten letters stay stealed in their torn envelopes, and I reach for my old diary.
It feels intrusive as I hesitantly turn the pages covered in confessions of a girl I used to know. However, I continue.
November 11th, 2021: I was told by my therapist this would make me less depressed.
Whoever came up with the adage,“anything is possible if you put your mind to it” has clearly never taken AT Bio. It is impossible.
What follows are two pages of word vomit – a clear indication that my mind was going a million miles an hour, in several different directions. I continue to skim through a year's worth of entries written by a version of myself I don’t remember being. I catch myself feeling sorry for her-- she was so lonely.
I leave my room to go downstairs for a family dinner. But now there are three plates, three sets of cutlery, three cups– not four. I don’t stop into my brother's room to remind him our mother has just spent hours preparing different meals for each of us to accommodate our pickiness, because he has officially moved out. He lives on the other side of the country, working a 9-5 job, beginning the next chapter of his life.
Everything feels different. I drive on the same roads, following the same routes, passing by the same park I biked to to secretly meet up with friends during COVID lockdown, but this time I have a lump in my throat. A lump so large, I can barely swallow. I fear I'll run into someone who used to know me better than I knew myself, only this time all we’ll do is make meaningless small talk about our first semester at college until the conversation ends with a see you later …but we both know that we won't see each other later.
I’ve never been good at accepting change. I don't dive into the unknown, but rather reluctantly face it with my head down and an anxious pit lingering throughout my chest and stomach. I have always found comfort in stability and familiarity– from a ripe age of five I filled the silence on family hikes or road trips with an apprehensive “are we lost?” or an eager “can you bring us back home, dad?”. Yet I have also always set ridiculously high standards for myself. I always want to do better, to be better. I want to progress. I want to accomplish great things. But the definition of progress itself inherently requires some acceptance of change.
In the past couple of years I have learned that change is really fucking scary. But sometimes scary is good. Sometimes letting go is good. And letting go doesn't mean forgetting or abandoning, it means growth. It means that I can still appreciate those moments that are now just memories and stories from afar. I can appreciate who I used to be, while acknowledging that all she needed to do to dig herself out of that depression was grow.
