A few hours later, I'm back at the airport, waiting for my boyfriend's arrival home.  He steps off the plane with the same groggy but excited look I wore hours before.  We drive over to see my dad, who seems calmer than my mother had been.  I ask to see my room, expecting to find my shrine, my old pompoms, prom pictures, candid photos of friends and dolls scattered about.  To my surprise, everything is gone; there's not even a trace I had ever lived in the room.  I'm starting to wonder if I really had been abducted on the way home.  It's as if the second I became a "college" student, I had ceased to exist.

I start to wonder what else had changed since I'd been gone.  My parents are in an awkward transition, wondering how to treat me now.  They wrestle with whether to treat me—still their daughter—as one of them, an adult, or as the child they feel they sent away months earlier.

I run into two of my best friends from high school; we stare blankly at each other.  We ask the simple questions and give simple, abrupt answers.  It's as if we have nothing to say to each other.  I wonder how things have changed so much in such a small amount of time.  We used to laugh and promise that no matter how far away we were, our love for each other would never change.  Their interests don't interest me anymore, and I find myself unable to relate my life to theirs.

I had been so excited to come home, but now I just look at it all and wonder: Is it me?

Why hadn't the world stood still here while I was gone?  My room isn't the same, my friends and I don't share the same bond, and my parents don't know how to treat me—or who I am, for that matter.

I get back to school feeling half-fulfilled, but not disappointed.  I sit up in my bed in my dorm room, surrounded by my pictures, dolls and mementos.  As I wonder what has happened, I realize that I can't expect the world to stand still and move forward at the same time.  I can't change and expect that things at home will stay the same.  I have to find comfort in what has changed and what is new; keep the memories, but live in the present.