It was great to be back in what I still consider, for the time being, home (I'm sure once I ever get around to getting married or having a family my view will change) at my parents' house in Waltham (which is located in the middle of nowhere in south eastern Minnesota). For the weekend before Christmas and the weekend before New Year's, I made the trek down and spent time with the family.
It's somewhat rarer nowadays for me to get back home. I often have activities on the weekends that keep me from getting home or, if I am free, my parents may have something going on or be working, so when I do get home it is very enjoyable... yet taxing, but not in a bad way, mind you.
As I've tried to establish myself on my own, revisiting what was essentially the center of my existence for more than a decade brings with it a rush of memories, snippets of the past, old nuances, and tons of long thought locked away emotions. And I know all of this overwhelms me because I'm there less and less and get further and further removed from the time that I had spent living there, growing up, and becoming the uniquely odd person I now am.
For as much that has changed in my parents' house, there is so much that is the same. My old room is now a guest bedroom, but it doesn't feel that way. The bed is different, there's no dressers (instead it is just random furniture put in there for storage), and there would appear to be no remnants of its previous occupant...
...but then I look around and even though my stuff isn't there any more, I know exactly how I used to have it set up--all of my cluttered, crazy organizational schemes for my junk, my computer setup in the corner inset of the room, and my bed (which was partially used to store crap on as I only slept on one half of it) standing out in the middle of it all.
Then there are also the little pieces of my time there that still remain. Flipping the light switch on I see that the uber-nerdy Star Trek light switch cover is still there. On the back of the door is a taped up scorecard that tracked all of my one-on-one basketball games against my brother, Randy. On my closet is still taped my print out of 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 1-13, the few bible verses that mean the world to me. In the closet, now filled with my mom's clothes, there's still the hood for my leather jacket stuck up on top of a shelf next to a baseball hat I never wore. On the bed's headboard is one of my math league medals and the manual to my old graphing calculator that I rarely used outside of the few times I needed it for tests in school where I couldn't figure something out on my own (I believed in not relying on my calculator, which I believed to be a hindrance to truly learning what I was being taught).
There were pieces of me left behind all over and with each one there were hundreds of memories attached, memories that come crashing together in a gigantic overload of nostalgia every time I set foot in my room. I know I can never go home again, as the saying goes, but it's just as impossible to forget home. And why would I want to?
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