Gather Up Your Jackets and Move it to the Exits, I Hope You Have Found a Friend

This place is my home and these people are my family. Everything that rests back in Bolingbrook is a memory. When I return we will talk and laugh and reminisce and that'll be all we have. These months apart have changed me and yet I will be viewed with old eyes. I am excited to see old friends again, and I am excited to have fun with them, but it aches inside, this idea of leaving the people here. They have been more integral to who I am now than any other person before aside from maybe Alex. Yet I am forced to deal with the unfairness of college; I am forced to come to school, live, eat, and breathe with these people, cry with these people, laugh with these people, pray with these people for months and then be stripped away from it all. Not only that, the place I return to is not even my home. My parents now live in a home in Minooka, a foreign world to me. I write this sounding bitter but it is only because I love these people. My bitterness is derived from love.
In just a matter of hours my parents will be here and I will load up the truck. We will pull off through the tree-lined drive to State Street and drive off into the distance and Wilson and Judson and my friendships will be on hold. I pray that I can welcome this waiting period called Summer with ease and eagerness. I pray that I can remain strong. God give me grace and give me joy. It's closing time.