and i live in between
I went on a walk with a friend who lives down the road from me the other night. She was home from her studies abroad for winter break, and we hadn't had any one-on-one time in a long time, so I was a little nervous. But we immediately started chatting about stuff we'd been thinking about and recent happenings, and she said something along the lines of, "I like how we just got right into it β no how have you beens or what's going ons."
I felt the same way and told her as much, adding on that it felt like we just picked up where we left off ten years ago, when we would do this in high school. That left us both reeling for a bit. Ten years ago!
It doesn't feel like high school was all that long ago, mostly because I usually don't feel all that different from who I was in high school. I spend most of my weekends at home drawing, watching cartoons, or having dinner with my family. My high school friends make up majority of my social circle here. I am opinionated to the point of obnoxious, unwilling to do (sometimes important or beneficial) things that I have no interest in, and get nervous meeting new people. I register periods of my life in my mind based on what show or game I was obsessed with. Even my haircut is more or less the same.
Some of this, of course, has to do with the fact that I live at home after being away for some time, and thus have settled back into old habits. College!me might have been more different from high school!me than current!me is, just because she was doing so many new things simply by being elsewhere, even if she still was mostly a homebody.
(Blog owner reveal, kind of.)
Of course, I am only picking out the neutral or negative similarities for the sake of a silly, self-deprecating post. There are some positives to resembling my high school self: I continue to care about the things that I love fiercely, and I'm just as close to my family as ever. I know myself and what I like very well, and I pursue the latter with a determination I'm starting to get back after the pandemic. And I'm happy that I can go on a walk with a friend I haven't spoken with in a while and have it feel... normal. Nice. Natural. Honestly, it can be comforting to feel like some things don't change β a grounding constant.
Every time I've been home since college, I've felt like I was just in an interim period: just taking a short break before getting (back) out there and being a real person with an eventful life. I felt that way in high school, restless to get "out there," and I guess it's carried over into today.
I still want to get back out there. I think being away from home has shaped me into a person who is better suited to being away, more than I already was before I'd lived abroad. It's not for lack of love for my family and friends here, but for the fact that I know I can only do the kind of growing I want for myself when I'm forced (by location) into independence.
But I'd like to unlearn the association I make between home and liminality, if at all possible. I don't want to feel like I'm not making the most of it simply by being here, especially if I'm here for the foreseeable future. The life I live here is real too, after all!
The title of this post is from My Heart is Split, by Kerrigan & Lowdermilk. It's a song that describes well how I felt moving between countries for college β so tethered to home but slowly turning into someone that was neither here nor there, and wondering how to make sense of her.
I'm cut in half
Two beds, two lives, and I live in between
My porch back at home and this strange new world I knit.
My heart is split.