I was eager to come home.  I cried when I saw my family and boyfriend at the airport, I’d missed them so much.  But the next couple of days felt weird.

I’m so happy to be back with my family and friends, don’t get me wrong.  And I know that home does not mean a house or a place, but rather the people who surround you.  But strangely, since being back in the States, back in California, nothing really truly feels like home anymore.

Being back at my parents’ house is familiar, and it moves me to nostalgia more than anything.  But I’ve been moved out.  Though it’s good to be back, for the past six years their house has been merely a place I come to visit for the weekend or so before returning to my reality, my college life back in San Diego. It stopped holding that feeling of permanence once I accepted my high school diploma back in ’06.

But even returning back to the house I called home in San Diego for five years felt strangely foreign.  The year this house has seen without me was all it took.  A lot changes in a year.  As much as I’ve grown in that time period, so had my prior surroundings and the people within that, molding to take on a new shape in my absence.

Odd how coming home couldn’t feel further away from it.  Even being surrounded by the people you love, the ones you’re familiar with, still doesn’t put you at ease, not like before.

Physically, I’m jet lagged (still!).  Emotionally, I’m restless.  I feel like I’m in a state of in-between.  It’s hard to describe.

But I guess that’s what happens when you’re gone for a year.  How could I expect to come home to a constant after a year of so much change?  Probably the most change I’ve ever experienced in my life.

If anything, it should teach me to embrace it, embrace this seemingly incessant feeling of uncertainty.  I should treat this like a blank canvas, and feel liberated that I can color it however I want to.  I’m in a transition stage, at a turning point.  I should stop being caught up (feeling down) over this weird funk I’m in.  I should be excited.  Because, let’s face it — most of the doors that close in my life will do so without my say anyway.  What I do have control over is seizing the opportunities that the opening of a new door could bring.

Things will fall into place, I’ll get my stride back.

Sitting here at Starbucks now, on their FREE WIFI.  So easy to come by here, weird.  Oh, and when I went to order I realized I’d completely forgotten the names of the cup size runs (Trenta now? REALLY??).  And that they offered so many damn options for one drink.  Can’t a girl just order un Americano without the complication?

I also forgot that the person I’m ordering from speaks fluent English.  That everyone in the place does, for that matter.  And in an American accent, which seemed almost foreign to me at first.

What a weird feeling it was to pump gas into my car for the first time.  And to come across my now-obsolete Arriva bus pass. And “Smoke-free zone”?  What’s that?