Time to start college!

So we arrived in Evanston today; move-in and the start of Welcome Week, are tomorrow, which is insane. None of this feels real. Everyone else has already been in college for what seems like forever, and though my awkward limbo state for the past two weeks has been, well, awkward and limbo-y, it felt familiar still – it was like summer hadn’t ended, like I was hanging around the house waiting for friends to come back from vacation.
We’re staying at this hotel in downtown Evanston, approximately six or seven blocks from my old house. It’s been 8 years since we moved, but I’ve visited Evanston nearly every year since then – either being dropped off or picked up from the buses for camp. Honestly, it feels wrong to be here again, like I’m moving backward, regressing, instead of moving on. I can’t help feeling like maybe I made a mistake, that I should’ve chosen a new town for college. The weird combination of familiarity and strangeness is just so disconcerting – I know this town, remember its streets, and yet I don’t belong. It doesn’t feel like home, but I know it used to be. Besides which, there isn’t nearly enough greenery – and I already miss the river.
I have this feeling I’ll be fine once I’m on campus; we never actually spent much time in Northwestern, and unlike downtown, my memories of it aren’t filled with awkwardness and a sense of non-belonging. Because the thing is, because we’ve visited so much for camp, my memories of this place aren’t the over-idealized childhood versions – they’re the awkward, middle school and junior high, and even high school realities, the times when I was just with my mom or my dad and we wandered around looking for a place to eat dinner, and I was either itching to leave or unhappy to be back.
Maybe it’s just because I didn’t live here in junior high/high school, which is when I really found my footing in terms of friends, but in my memory, the people in Evanston are different from the people in St. Paul. Not as nice, not as much like me, people I will always feel a little on edge talking to. And I know, that’s not true, I just made a few bad friend choices in elementary school, and the students at Northwestern aren’t necessarily like the people from Evanston, and the reason I feel such a disconnect with some of the people at camp is because they all know each other from high school and have similar experiences they can bond over, but fears and feelings aren’t always subject to logic or reason.
(I don’t really think this post makes that much sense, but that’s okay. I feel better for having written it, putting my words on…well, not paper, but you know. Down somewhere.)