It is especially joyful to return home from college when you have been living with other students and studying for a very long time. About how students study and how they live in the rooms, you can order college term papers for sale.
Going home for a few days can be a luxury: free food, clean sheets, meals out, meeting friends, free food, family times, and yes, more free food. There’s nothing better than opening up a fully stocked fridge, realising you paid for none of it, yet knowing you have the God-given ability to eat all of it. You get to see your family, your friends, and perhaps a well-loved pet. It’s pleasant, and those few days can be a treat in the midst of dissertation stress and the looming prospect of exams. It’s the very definition of a home away from home. Literally. I go from one home to another. Albeit a cleaner, quieter home that smells less of weed and more of Ambi Pur 3Volution.
But then the realisation hits me smack-bang in the face. I have to move back here. I have to leave my hard fought independence. Say farewell to my double bed in my room with a lock. Au revoir to day long sessions of Netflix before running off to the library for midnight sessions of essay writing and self-loathing. And worst of all, arrivederci to that beautiful loan instalment that comes like clockwork three times a year. It was good while it lasted. But all good things come to an end. I should have learned that lesson with the Spice Girls.
Suddenly I’m no longer a student, but a regular human being living in a world with too many questions and not enough answers. What do I want to do with my life? Who do I want to be? Do I travel? Move abroad? Should I do a masters? Is Beyoncé really a feminist?
So many important questions that are just too hard to answer right now.
It’s likely I’ll see my friends become employed, I’ll congratulate them over Facebook and we’ll make plans to meet up soon. But to my sisters I’ll talk of how they’re a flawed person, unqualified for the job, and that one time they slept with this really fugly person who was like, super gross.
Perhaps while I’m at home I’ll get fit. Sure, I might be working in admin during the day, but in the evenings I can work on my glutes and sculpt my pecs. I buy my membership and I go maybe once a week. It’s not that I don’t want to get fit, it’s just that I’ve become preoccupied with my new hobby, cross-stitching. It’s the perfect way to reconnect with my uni friends. Who doesn’t want to be sent a cross-stitch in the post? Everybody. That’s who.
These fears are irrational, surely? Everybody has them. I haven’t even moved home yet so there’s no point in freaking the eff out.
But I know that my time at uni is coming to an end, and everything I do from now on is leading towards one thing; me, a graduate of a top ten university, moving back home with no career in sight. Like so many of us out there I was too oblivious to look for grad jobs, too idealistic to realise uni would end, or maybe just too lazy to really care. So I pack up my things and move back into the bedroom where I once thought David Guetta was cool.
What’s waiting for me there? I wonder. Apart from that fridge full of food? It appears only time will tell. But if there’s one piece of information I can leave you with, it’s this; if you apply for the same job as me, I’ll do everything in my power to take you down, bitch.