...because people whose families are gone or split up or just not coming to town get really depressed, especially as said people get older. The opposite kind of phenomenon happens to me when I go home for the holidays...
The hardest thing for me to get used to about being home is consistently the shock of how much time I spend alone. I thought this would change this year, because I have a single, but I simply don't spend any significant waking time there, so it unfortunately has no desensitizing effect on me. Even at a school that falls into the "small private" category for my JP, on campus I'm almost always in the presence of other people. Even though I live in a single, a hundred or so people live in my building, and I can hear the girls across from me laughing sometimes. It's no big deal for the girl in the shower stall next to me to ask to borrow my body wash; bathrooms have been deprivatized. (Yes I just made that word up.) I eat all my meals with a subset of the same group of 70ish people, the Large Library has a crew, and there are certain friends I can't see without hugging.
But my house isn't structured for such interactions. With the split levels, it's really as if every person has his or her own floor. My sister and I flip-flop between the living room (2nd landing) and our bedroom (5th landing), rarely coexisting in the same space. My brother's room is on the third landing, next to the office with the computer he broke, so no one else is ever there, and my mom spends all her time in her room on the third landing. We each exist in our own separate worlds, and rarely do they meet.
My friends aren't within walking distance here. Even if they were, I don't feel the same ability to just show up uninvitedly; here in the real world, there are families and gatherings and other plans.
So here there are days when I realize I hadn't spoken until after 3 this afternoon, simply because there was no one to say hello to til then.
India would say Sometimes I'm alone, but never lonely. I wish I could agree with her. And E says this shouldn't bother me as much as it does. She says free time is a gift that I should be thankful for, but free ALONE time has always been a curse to me. I'm good at creating space and time for me within lots of hustle and bustle, but I'm at a total loss when "free time" stretches before me like a lake with the stillest of waters. It's not even that I would like to have everything planned out, because I'm not the biggest of planners, it's just...if I'm watching TV, I would rather have someone to laugh at the TV with, someone to steal the blanket from, someone to roll their eyes at me when I tear up. It's that, while I wouldn't mind getting one of those fancy new touchscreen handheld Scrabble console things, I would always rather have an actual partner to play an actual game with. It's so quiet here. I miss the strange commingling of first-person-shooter and Mario Galaxy sounds coming from the Game Room.
Fact that others may find sad but I just consider to be a fact of life: My friend circles have always felt more familial to me than my actual family feels most of the time. That only really bothers me at all around the holidays, when everyone disappears from AIM and Facebook and talks about all the fun they're having/going to have with their families. I smile and nod like I'm cosigning that, but really all I think about is how much I miss the people I share my life with. Those people and the people who share my DNA or even my permanent address have never been one and the same.
Thought that actually saddens/terrifies me: Is this what's waiting for me when undergrad life ends?
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