I stepped off the plane and into New Jersey last week for the first time in three months. I can't believe that my first semester of college is coming to end. It was just yesterday when I arrived in South Carolina, a scared and frizzy mess. I had no idea what to expect, and without anyone's help, I made new friends, learned to play football, and managed to pass all my classes. There were nights I was so alone I thought I'd explode and days where I had so much fun and times when I got so drunk I thought my liver would collapse. It was hard but I did it, and nothing excited me more than coming home for Thanksgiving and seeing all my friends.

For once in three months I was relaxed, because you can never be relaxed at college. Someone is always there, you always have to make an impression on someone, I felt like I was always on egde. I finally got to sit around my house and watch TV in my pajamas and let my mom cook dinner and do the wash. My friends and I did the same stupid shit as we always did. I really had a great time. But something was not the same as it once was. When I went to bed each night, my bed was not was as comfortable as I remembered it being. My room was foreign and cold. There were no posters on the walls. The house fell silent at 10, when in school people stayed up till all hours of the night. It felt good to drive, and I recognized all the strees, but for the firt time in my life I felt that this was not really my home. Everything reminded me of Columbia, and I thought of my college friends all the time. I missed it there, and although I needed this break, I realized that I had done something I never thought I could do. I didn't think it would be possible to leave a place I had lived in for 17 years and go hundreds of miles away and be more comfortable there in a matter of months than I was in the place where I was born. I had been independent for so long that the second my mother started asking questions I would snap at her. I had to ask to go places. Ask to use the car. Deal with the incredibly slow internet. I was used to doing what I wanted when I wanted to do it, and that's not something you can easily give up once you get used to it.

New Jersey has diners, cold weather, fast drivers, good coffee and pizza, my best friends, and all the other things I grew up loving. But Columbia is the place where I struggled to make it work until at last it did. Columbia is where my small room with my laptop and posters and pictures and my bed with the really warm purple comforter is. It's here where I first drove along winding roads while listening to country, experienced the thrill of being in a crowded football stadium, and volunteered my time to poor kids on Fridays. Because of this school I got to go to Mississippi and I got involved with leadership. It's here where I discovered new bands and sought out new opportunities and learned things about myself that might never have occured to me if I was still in New Jersey. When I flew into Columbia today, I felt truly at home.