Day 06 - A picture of a person you'd love to trade places with for a day.
Day 07 - A picture of your most treasured item.
And now to expound.
My favorite memory (that I have photo documentation of) is the memory of the road trip I took with three friends after our senior year. It was a graduation present from my grandparents, who own a timeshare in Seaside, Oregon (and just about everywhere else it seems). We got four days at Seaside to kick-start the summer after graduation and before college. This was the first big multi-day road trip I'd ever taken, and it was with three girls that I've known for most of my life (we went to school together from kindergarten through high school). It was incredible because, while we had some general plans for our stay (for example, when to check in, when to check out, and somewhere in there we should probably go out on the beach huh?), we kept the trip really loose and impulsive. We made side trips whenever we felt like it and got lost on the way there; we took the long way home and drove on some of the worst-maintained and most beautiful highways all up the coast (and got lost for a minute between Yakima and Ellensburg), and we all had a blast the entire time. As I get older and go more places on my own and with other people, I see more and more how rare it is that people just take it easy and treat every misstep as a new adventure.
I would love to trade places with Betty White, just for a day. Betty White is amazing. She is almost frigging ninety years old and she's one of the funniest actresses around. She's a household name, and she has been for quite some time. Basically, Betty White can get away with anything. To have that power, even for just one day...
My most treasured "item" is Percy. I know that pets are not "items," they are living creatures and deserve to be treated as more than just possessions. But I do technically own him (don't tell him that), and out of everything I own he is the only thing I would unthinkingly risk my life to save if the house was burning down.
Which brings me to an interesting segue. Right now, my most treasured item is prowling around my bedroom, sniffing things and trying to decide whether to stay mad at me or not. This is because I am home for Christmas vacation. I get to be home for an entire month. I've been counting down to this day since the second week of school. I was so excited to get home, it was unreal.
And now I'm here.
I'm honestly happy to be home, don't get me wrong. It's just that... It's really, really hard to put as much distance between yourself and your family as I did for as long of a period of time as I did and then come back. Life goes on at home when I'm not here, and my life goes on whether I'm home with my family or fourteen hundred miles away and on my own. It's stupid to expect everything to be exactly the same as it was when I left it, but that's still what I expected in the back of my mind. And the incongruity is affecting me.
People change. I know people change. I watched as some key people in my life started to change even before I'd left. Did I expect them to go back to how they used to be? No, of course not. It makes sense that they would continue to change along the same pattern, and if we were growing apart then, well, it would make sense that we're even more distant now.
But it still hurts. And I'm not sure what to do. I'm happy to be home, but sometimes I wish home was different.
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