On my last day in Tucson I awoke to the sounds of Christmas carols being played by church bells somewhere in the distance. Songs like Hark! The Harold Angel Sings and Silent Night. The morning was warm and sunny, just as every other day had been for the last several months. Normally I would've been groaning about having to get up at 9am, but today was the day I was finally going home after three and a half long months in Arizona.

My roommates had already left for winter break. Matt had driven back to Prescott to be with his mom a few days prior and Adam had left in the late hours of the night to try to catch a stand-by flight to Chicago instead of going with his scheduled flight at six o'clock that night. The dorm was eerily quiet without either of them around. Quiet and empty. Other than their absence though you could argue that everything was the same as it was on any other day. It certainly didn't feel like the middle of December, let alone nine days before Christmas.

I had packed the night before and now all I had to do were the last minute chores of making sure the room was alright (since I was the last person to leave) before I left: close and lock all the windows, turn off the heating, and make sure everything was unplugged. I locked the door on my way out and dragged my suitcases (one large red one on wheels, another smaller carry-on bag) down three flights of stairs, silently cursing the fact that our dorm lacked an elevator for the thousandth time. Then I waited for the shuttle driver to call me, as I know he or she inevitably would. Cochise is on an obscure little side-street, and every shuttle driver I have always gets lost. I'm terrible at giving directions because I'm still not familiar with the layout of Tucson. It's a little miracle every time they manage to find me.

Although I've only done it a few times, the process of airport travel has already become second nature to me. Find the airline terminal, check-in, get my boarding pass, go through security, find the right gate, wait for the boarding procedures to begin, then find the right gate at Dallas for the connecting flight to Hartford (you can't get a direct flight from Tucson to Hartford, so I'm always stuck flying through Dallas). In Dallas I stopped by an airport Subway to get a sandwich, and when I turned on my phone I realized I had a voice message from a friend of mine who thought I was already home and wanted to know what my plans were for the weekend. I had originally planned on coming home on December 14 instead of the 16th until I found out that I had a final on the 15th. Apparently I had forgotten to tell her that itinerary had since changed. I called her back and awkwardly let her know that I was in Dallas at the moment and wouldn't be home until late that night. It made me smile, knowing there were people expecting me to be home and who wanted to see me.

I arrived in Hartford at a quarter after eleven at night. Trish and my girlfriend at the time were supposed to be picking me up, so I was surprised when I didn't see them walking through the terminal to the baggage claim area. I called them and asked them where they were. "We're in the terminal," Trish said. "No, you're not," I told her. Not the correct terminal at any rate. It was a half an hour fiasco for them to find me.

"Every airline has the same terminal except for American Airlines which has its own separate terminal!" she lamented to me after finally finding me walking down a sidewalk that lead to nowhere. "Well, duh!" I thought to myself. I thought it was implied that picking me up from my American Airlines flight required going to the American Airlines terminal. But at that point I didn't care. I was with my girlfriend in the backseat, and in that moment that was all that mattered to me.

If I lacked any amount of Christmas spirit, there were plenty of holiday chores waiting for me upon my arrival home. The next day I helped hang the outside lights on the house, brought the Christmas tree upstairs, hung the lights and decorations on it, and wrapped half a trillion presents while listening to Phantom Planet rock out with Walking in a Winter Wonderland and Perry Como telling the story of the first Christmas in the way that only Perry Como can do.

Now I come to this, the weekend before Christmas, and it's funny to think about all the crazy adventures that lead up to this point. An epic list of random events, from the last few months of senior year, the summer vacation after graduation, the self-imposed exile to the University of Arizona, and finally the return home again to Terryville, the quiet little town where it all began--and, it could be said, the only place I've ever felt at home.