"The jig is up," my mother said.

"This time next year you'll be off starting your own life hopefully somewhere far away, and that means that it's time for you to start getting rid of your junk. All the stuff in you and your sister's room, in the basement--go through it, figure out what you want to keep, what's trash, what can go to Goodwill." 

Translation: you don't live here anymore. 

I've been saying that to myself for a while now, jokingly calling myself a houseguest when I go home, but evidently the time to make that a legitimate reality is fast approaching. My mother wants me to move out of her house. 

I think this is the single most intimidating thing anyone has ever said to me. Nothing really says you're not a kid anymore like your mom wants her closet space back.

I'm claiming the GRE as an excuse to not start this project until the next time I'm home on break, but I'm already freaking out a little. I'm sure this is going to be a huge emotional rollercoaster, as I will literally be digging through the remains of my childhood and seeing most of it go out the door. 

The clothes I don't wear anymore: First, I will let my sister rifle through them. We're basically the same size and she kind of considers anything I leave in the room while I'm at school to be her property anyway. My less over-the-top semi-formal/formal dresses that still fit, I will probably keep in hopes that owning such dresses will inspire me to have a life that involves cocktail parties, fancy dates, and ridiculous birthday outings. I've been meaning to sell the others on ebay for a while now. I have a very large collection of heels, most of which still fit, but are in varying degrees of wear. I will see which of these seem most like they need to be part of my adult life, and the rest will go in the Goodwill bags.

That may be the only clearly definable category. Other random stuff I'm expecting to find: old CDs that I might try to sell at the Princeton Record Exchange for a few bucks, a ridiculous number of books that I should mail in small amounts to my friend Krystal who is teaching English in Alabama somewhere and has an absolute dearth of material for her 7th graders, nick-knacks and souvenirs from places I went on school trips in elementary school, remnants from my Magick phase, old photographs, gifts given to me by friends I barely speak to anymore. A memory box to which I've lost the key. Broken jewelry and earrings that are missing their other halves. 

What from that cornucopia of miscellany deserves salvaging? Is any of it worth bringing with me as I move forward into the rest of my life? If the remnants of the first 18 years of my life can be divided into trash bags and trash-bags-that-are-going-to-Goodwill, with the exception of two teddy bears, a couple of decorative pillows, and maybe a few pairs of shoes...where has the important stuff from my life gone? I know my mom isn't wrong when she calls it all "junk," but...it's the junk that made me. But when the junk that made you no longer defines you, you have to let it go, right?

The stuff that's in my dorm (okay, well right now is in various closets in my house waiting to go back to my dorm) is way more relevant to my last-year-of-undergrad self than anything in my bedroom is. That's scary, but it's the truth. I've grown up. It's time for that which I lay claim to to grow up too.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 30--Letter to a Place that Feels Like Home

Dear Princeton University,

I suppose the easiest way for me to say this is that nowhere (with the possible exception of P's house the summer after my sophomore year of high school) has ever felt like home to me the way you do. Professor Glaude, who I have never actually had a conversation with but feel close to thanks to AG, stresses the importance of being able to feel ownership over you, and unlike many of my peers, I have never struggled with this. I never mumble that I go to "a small private school in Jersey" when asked what college I attend; I speak your name proudly. Less two brief academic freakouts during Freshman Year, I have never felt like I don't belong with you or like I'm not enough for you. Less one incident involving a bunch of students from other institutions and a bunch of anonymous comments on the Prince's website and one precept full of jocks, I have never felt anything but accepted by you and all your various representatives, even if I'm not what they expect when we first meet. 
I love my friends from my life before/outside of Princeton, and many of them will be integral parts of my person til I am dead and buried, but sometimes I feel like you have given me people who get me in a way no one else ever has. With you, I can get closer to a person in 2 months than I did in 14 years of living in Mays Landing. No matter the season, turning onto Washington Road from Route 1 and driving through the trees that line the road makes me feel like all is right with the world. You are beautiful in both the exquisite, ornate, timeless sense, and the modern state-of-the-art setting-the-pace-for-the-rest-of-the-world sense. You've taught me so much about myself. I've tried being various people here, as I settle into who I actually am, but I rarely if ever feel like I have to try to be anyone but me. I can be unabashedly nerdy. I can also be more ethnic than I had ever been previously, and get in touch with an urban side I'd never had before. I don't feel like a walking contradiction when I'm with you. I don't feel weird.
I've been told that I glow when I'm talking about you. My first words whenever anyone asks are invariably I absolutely love [you], and it is the truest of truths. I'm not going to lie: you are undoubtedly the hardest thing I have ever done, though probably not the hardest thing I will ever do, and you are worth every minute of it, even the bleakest. You are my life. There is no way for me to convey to you how validated you made me feel. There is no way for me to tell you about the panic attacks I had for months during the spring of my Senior year in high school as I felt like an idiot for not having applied to any safety schools that wouldn't have been painful to attend, and no way for me to explain that on that fateful first day of April, 2008, I sobbed with something greater than joy sitting in the computer chair in my mom's office after reading the word Congratulations, feeling as though everything I had endured in my life had combined with a hell of a lot of luck to get me to that exact moment. I don't know how to say thank you in a way that even approaches appropriate, besides the facts that I will a) donate to you in increasingly large amounts [maybe not an incredibly noticeable increase every year, but an increase] every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, b) be fully decked out in my orange and black at reunions every year from 2012 until I am dead and buried, and c) providing that I don't have any children, you will be the greatest recipient in my will. Any conference, event, anything you might want/need my presence for, I am yours. And even all of that isn't nearly enough, but reciprocity is impossible in this circumstance. You're in the process of giving me an entirely new world, more than anyone in my entire family could ever have dreamed.
I know that when I walk out of the Fitz-Randolph gates on June 5th, I won't be leaving you forever. Like the director of the Honors Program at Columbia told me on my visit, I am a Tiger. Now and tomorrow and for the rest of my life. I still don't know how I'll manage it without breaking down, though. I'll never be without you and your resources, I know, but I still can't imagine life without you surrounding me. With centuries' worth of alumni, though, I guess you'll always be surrounding me...

May the rest of our life together be as glorious as these past three-and-counting years have been,

Maya 

My life is such a strange mixture of childhood and adulthood.

I suppose I should expect that, based on everything I learned doing my independent work this year, but the degree to which my lived experiences mirror/exceed what I found in my research still strikes me.
I guess part of this feeling stems from being back home for these past two weeks. It's so easy to feel like no time at all has passed as I slip back into familiar roles with my mom, my brother and sister, my friends from high school, my town as a concept. It's so easy to do all the familiar comfortable old things again: friends' houses that haven't changed in recent memory, the same old mall, the same old bowling alley, the same pink house we park next to when we go to the beach. Home is...comfortable, like a favorite sweatshirt, but also makes me feel as though I haven't aged. 
Except now I can drink...legally. Which means I get to see my hometown/the surrounding area in one new light: that of the local bar scene. I can find out today that I got an A on my JP (!!!) and then hit up happy hour at Applebee's with my bestie for drinks and not get carded and simply enjoy life. I can enjoy an amaretto sour from the bar at the bowling alley I've been going to since I was so little I had to squat and push the ball on the floor with both hands to get it down the lane. 
And that's not the only thing that reminds me I'm an adult. I sent my landlord (!) the check for my first month's rent (!) at the place in New Brunswick I'm subletting yesterday. I'm embarking on the process of buying a netbook to replace my computer that got stolen. I'm a real person, I promise. 
And yet I bought sidewalk chalk and a water gun from Five Below this week. When I went to fill out my I-9 because I have a job on campus this summer, the woman at the Financial Aid office didn't know how to fill out the form because I'd brought a non-driver ID instead of a license, because I don't have one. Sure I'm moving out to live in a house on my own for the first time (even temporarily), but my mom is still driving me and all my shit. 
I just feel so in-between in so many ways. But I've learned that that's how I'm SUPPOSED to feel right now, that that's what your twenties are for, so I guess I'm on the right track. This growing up thing is so hard.   

Where do I live?

On Monday when my friend T and I went shopping, a cashier at New York and Company looked up my account and exclaimed, "My, you're in [the computer database] a lot! What's your address?" I stammered, wondering what was the most appropriate answer. I told her I was a college student, that was complicated. She said okay, Mays Landing, Princeton, or Chicago? I told her to get rid of Chicago, but I chuckled because New Brunswick will be added to that list soon. I really hate incidents like this, where I have to tell someone where I live. Where I am is rarely where I'm from, it's also rarely where I'll be for very much longer, and that makes me feel...slightly homeless. 

I want to make a major life change...

...that may be a little premature according to the tangible markers of adulthood I've attained, but should have happened a longggggg time ago emotionally: I am going to start referring to the house I grew up in as "my mom's house", rather than as "home". While seeing my family still feels like "home" for the first day or two, and seeing the friends I grew up with can have the same effect, this place is no longer my home. My home is in Princeton, NJ right now. My home is where I live. It's 113 Edwards 33 Prospect Street, for now, but that will change over the summer, and again in a year and a half, and again and again after that. But this house that I'm in right now, it's not home anymore, and while that makes me feel slightly homeless sometimes, it's something I need to come to terms with.

Thanks for bringing me home.

This post is in honor of all the people you don't realize how much you've missed until you're with them again. We've somehow reached that age where the weeks between seeing old friends can turn into months and even years easily if we're not careful. I'm writing to tell you to be careful. Take a random opportunity to do a familiar activity with a familiar face. That feeling of sliding comfortably back into a past you thought was lost forever is what being home is all about in the first place isn't it? It's funny how people can hold onto little pieces of your heart for so long that you forget they even have them, til you're with them again and you feel home; home is where the heart is, and tonight reminded me that, while not broken, my heart is in a million places. Only a true friend can remind you of memories you forgot you had. Only a true friend turns a bad day into a warm, fuzzy one. Only true friends remind you that no matter how old you get, or how time changes you, there is always a way to belong.

Go find those people in your life over this break. Do something with them. Actively remember the person you once were, regardless of whether once was last month or ten years ago, and add this to your resolutions: do more to espouse the things you loved about her.  

They say the most suicides happen around the holidays...

...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?