I wound up going to see my family after the new year - it was lovely and exciting to get to look into their eyes and tell them I love them, to hug my competent, grown up daughter and tell her how proud I am of her graduation, her first professional job.
The experience was also profoundly disorienting. I've been in California for two and a half years now; I'm a busy returning college student with lovely, excellent friends. As I sat in my father's living room with the once-trendy Moroccan gold paint I picked out for the walls, drinking coffee from the same cartoon mug I drank from as a teenager mumble years ago, I was struck by the sensation that my life here was a mirage, a vivid dream I had suddenly waked from.
No thank you, very much.
