Running into hometowners

Hours after returning from my freshman year of college, I had the first of many run-ins with a Hometowner. A Hometowner is a person with the dangerous ability to look at you, and instantly reduce you to feeling twelve years old again. They can come in the guise of an old teacher, a best friend from the sandbox or even that kid who had more slap bracelets than you did in second grade. Whatever the case, a Hometowner definitely does not see you as the intelligent, smooth, college student that you think you’ve become. Ouch. How exactly do you explain to someone all of the experiences that you’ve had since you’ve been gone? Can you show a Hometowner you’ve changed? I was innocently trying to purchase an iced-coffee when I ran smack into Hometowner “Brian Smith.” Brian was the first boy who ever asked me to dance – and by dance I mean shuffle shyly in circles while looking at the floor, silently thanking whoever decided to make “Stairway to Heaven” the longest song in middle school dance history. I hadn’t seen Brian since high school graduation, and suddenly there he was right in front of me, looking at me as if I were still the same girl he had known in high school. The typical conversation with a Hometowner is short, brief and involves discussing things of little importance. You want to tell these people so much, but what can you really say in those few fleeting moments of running into someone? What I really wanted to do that afternoon was hand Brian a Power Point demonstration on everything I had learned, from mastering a Hot Pot and a keg stand, to reading books that blew my mind and thinking in ways I never thought possible. I wanted to show him I was someone different! Yet I knew I couldn’t, as such experiences cannot be explained over a single iced-coffee. This summer I will go home and inevitably run into many more Hometowners, but I’m used to this by now. I’ve come to realize that experiences are things that change you, even if you can’t always share them. Brian will probably never know about my life away from home. He also will probably never know that our dance was the best seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of my eleven-year-old life.