A year has passed and now we are about to return to a world where we are surrounded by the paradox of everything, and yet nothing is the same. In a few days we will be reluctantly hugging and, fighting back tears, saying goodbye to people who were once just names on a sheet of paper, back to being people we hugged and loved. we fought back tears to say goodbye before leaving. We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends. We will return to the places we came from and return to the same things we did last summer and all the summers before. We'll arrive in town along the same familiar route, and even though it's been months, it will seem like it was yesterday. As you enter your old room, all the emotions will flow through you as you reflect on how your life has changed and the person you have become. You suddenly realize that the things that were most important to you a year ago don't seem to matter much anymore, and that the things that matter most to you now, no one at home will completely understand. School memories and stories will win. It means nothing to anyone at home and yet you blame them for not being able to share this happiness with you. Who will you call first? What will you do your first weekend at home with your friends? How long before you start to miss people barging in without calling or knocking? Who's going to eat pizza with you at three in the morning now? How long will it take for you to get used to sleeping alone in a room again? Then you start to realize how much things have changed, and you realize that the hardest part of college is balancing the two completely different worlds you live in now, desperately trying to hang on. while trying to figure out what you need to leave behind. In the span of a day's travel, we will leave our world of life next to our best friends, crossing campus for food, instant messaging, 8 a.m. classes, and perpetual procrastination into a world that will seem foreign to us. despite the fact that we lived there for eighteen years. But it's different now.