I’m back! And you are?

I return to BSC this Sunday after being away a year. Until a few weeks ago, I held a comfortable, almost blasé attitude about returning, picturing myself effortlessly slipping back into the community, school, campus of BSC. Then, at the beginning of August, I started to get nervous, really nervous. I’ve been gone a year. When I return, will anyone notice me? Will anyone care that I’m back or that I ever left? Will people even remember me? As a different person in an old place, will I fit back in? While I’ve been away, will everyone have bonded so tightly, closing the little space I once occupied, leaving no room for me? Are we not meant to return to the places we’ve left? But I was always meant to return. I left, every day knowing I would return.

Then, in blazing mid-August, I meet up with a friend from BSC, and it was so easy to talk, so easy to fall back into the give and take and natural pause of conversation, like that year had folded into itself, creating a nice storybook to share instead of an immense gap to yell across, and I wasn’t nervous anymore. Once again, I knew what had known before I left-- it was the same resolve that had given me the confidence to leave— that some things even the Atlantic cannot erode, that the people who I would care about leaving for a year will care about me returning from that year, that neither of us would stop caring about the other. Those are the people who I am returning to.

As far as being a different person after a year away, if I had stayed at BSC, I would still be a different person than who I was August 2010, because to go a year without changing is to go a year without living. In turn, I am expecting everyone else to have changed as well. As I wrote nearly a year ago on this same blog, “They will change. I will change. Life for both of us will continue. And that is okay. It diminishes nothing.”

But even after this year, after this grand adventure, after this trip to England around the sun and back to the States, I am still very much the same girl who left only now, hopefully, a little wiser with clearer eyes and a few good stories gathered along the way.

P.S. The woah-weird thing about studying abroad for my junior year and returning for my senior year is that the two classes above me that had always been a part of my BSC experience will both be gone, replaced by two classes of freshmen and sophomores that I do not even know the existence of. I’m now going to walk around campus knowing about five people.

P.S.S. Photo Booth is narcissistic.