I have started unpacking.

“Finally,” you might say, if you are the responsible sort. Of course, if you are the responsible sort, you probably wouldn’t be back in your parents’ house. Or maybe you would — that’s a question I’m still sorting out.

Of course, the post-tornado aesthetic still reigns supreme in my room. All I’m saying is that I have taken a few articles of clothing that I purchased in Paris and given them homes in Missouri drawers and on American hangers for the first time. I have pushed aside smaller sizes I was wearing when I left and made room for clothes that accommodate my post-macaron-and-croissant ass.

And oh, that hometown feeling is back. The change from summer to fall is in the air and suddenly it is two years ago this time, and I am watching my friends return to school on Facebook, feeling the shock of my presence in this home. I lose myself in the weight of the time warp feeling that makes me fifteen and suffocating, because, “Oh look at everyone doing these great things! And here I am, both becoming that girl and letting her down!”

But that feeling fades as quickly as it comes, because I have so much more clarity than I did two years ago. I have traveled, seen, learned, etc., and home mostly has that cozy blanket on a cold day feeling.
Not that I can be sure of what that feeling is like — it’s fucking hot here. I don’t remember cold. (But no, I am not complaining! LET ME NEVER REMEMBER COLD! Please? Pretty please?)

This has been a weird month. I started it by waking up in my underwear in a bunk-bed in Croatia. I flew back to Paris and cried into glasses of Sangria because even if Paris was never meant to be home, I loved it dearly and the people that were sitting at that table with me were a kind of home for me. I am nauseatingly homesick for them right now.

If we’re talking about it, casually, I’ll tell you that I miss French bread, and picnics with wine and cheese under the Eiffel Tower. This is the truth I tell to make small talk. It’s a misleading truth; I’d take my picnic buddies over the wine and cheese any day of the week.

But I am home. I am home with homiest of people in my life. And I’m back to my car; I road tripped to Michigan and DC and enjoyed the happy solitude I find on these trips. Things that were normal before are normal again, and in a way that doesn’t make me so anxious like the last time I came home. That is, I understand how simple it is to leave. (As a recent zefrank video put it: “Leaving is just the going without the coming back.”)

I am here for a reason, and I will probably stall and fuck around a fair bit before I get it done (“it” being my thesis) but sooner or later, I’ll get it done. I will engage in both the stalling and eventually the completing for the same reason, of course: it’s what stands between me and leaving again. That end is both desirable and scary because it means decision-making and decision-making is just gross a totally great responsible thing to do!

I’m working my odd jobs again and side-eyeing my stack of thesis research books, reveling in this in-between place, filled with numerous first world problems like “boredom.” If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I have gotten a bit crazed with the whole VEDA thing. It has been a good little project, keeping me busy with something that I genuinely enjoy.

Because unpacking is not one of those things. But maybe by the end of the month, I’ll have found homes for the full contents of my exploded suitcases. Probably not.