30 Things I Miss About Home When I’m Away At College

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1. Showering without shoes on

2. My mom’s food (don’t go home for a home cooked meal in the middle of the year or else dining hall dinner will start to look like sewer garbage)

3. Beds larger than the infamous twin XL

4. Singing at the top of my lungs while I’m home alone

5. My dog, to the point where I’ve asked my mom to make her FaceTime me

6. Baths. Baths. Baths.

7. Driving around and blasting music

8. Greasy food with best friends on the way home from terrible high school parties

9. Irreplaceable local restaurants

10. Avoiding eye contact with people from school at the grocery store

11. Pining over my long list of unrequited high school crushes (it was a simpler time)

12. Not hearing 137 fire alarms go off per day because apparently we got into college but don’t know how to make popcorn

13. My mom getting so tired of the laundry piling up that she does it for me

14. Talking to my favorite high school teacher like we were best friends

15. Peace

16. Quiet

17. Childhood friends

18. When sick days were watching Nickelodeon in my childhood bed and my mom making me chicken noodle soup instead of falling behind on 100 pages of reading and having to stay in all weekend to catch up

19. Walking around the mall with best friends, the purest form of blissful adolescent joy

20. Waking up on Sunday to homemade pancakes instead of existential crises and cramming for a Monday midterm worth 20% of my grade that I just started studying for

21. All of the familiar landmarks and roads and street names and radio stations and smells and little ‘home’ things that I can’t find anywhere else in the world

22. The one cute cashier I always see at the store

23. When my biggest worry was that I forgot put the chicken out to thaw like my mom told me to instead of the dark crushing oppressive uncertainty of the future

24. Sleeping naked

25. Not having to schedule my mental breakdowns/crying to avoid having my roommate walk in on me

26. My mom

27. Starry home night skies

28. Things about my city that only people from my city understand

29. Having every random, tiny, useless thing I’ve ever owned at my disposal

30. Home. Because it’s home.