I can understand why people feel nostalgic about high school in the time immediately following their graduation. Ever since I've left high school I feel like I've been saying more goodbyes than hello's, imparting words of farewell more often than greetings. I can understand how that can be depressing.

There's also a prevailing feeling that you're losing your home. Once you leave for college you're forever spending time counting down the days until you have to leave again, and the second you arrive home people are asking how soon you depart. College becomes home and home becomes a place you stay in-between semesters.

That was the feeling I got when I was home for winter break. I enjoyed being with family and friends during the holidays, and it was arguably the best Christmas I had in living memory. But in the back of my mind was the constant thought that I only had a little over three weeks to spend there (a much shorter span of time than most colleges afford). The stay was only a temporary reprieve from all the work that was ahead of me during my upcoming spring semester. While I was home I never fully unpacked, half-living out of my suitcase the entire time. At times all the comforts of home--the fantastic food, the comfortable bed, the perpetually clean bathroom, and all the wonderful people I spent time with--seemed only like a painful reminder of everything I was going to be missing out on once I had to go back to Tucson.

Despite having those thoughts nagging me from the back of my mind, I was looking forward to the next semester of college. After thinking of my self-imposed exile to the University of Arizona as a, well, as a self-imposed exile, I felt much better about going back. It was nothing like when I first had to leave for college, venturing into a vast unknown world I knew nothing about to study who-knows-what and starting all my friendships from scratch. Now I knew everything around campus, my dorm, my routine, my major, and my roommates. After several painful months of adjustment when I first arrived I had managed to make a new life for myself. I had something here that I was returning to.

So I said all the familiar goodbyes, and this time they weren't filled with nearly as much sadness. My friends and I had learned that this was just a process that came with growing up and moving out into the world. We had managed to stay close through a few months apart--surely we could manage to do that again. And, perhaps we would even be stronger people for it. If that sentiment wasn't strong enough, there was the comforting knowledge that after this semester we would have our first summer break as college kids together--a blissful three and a half months to bask in our youth (and our summer jobs, but primarily our youth).

When all of us in Cochise returned after our winter break, it was like the whole gang was back, reunited for a second season of crazy adventures. Late nights and procrastination. Movies and sordid conversations. And random conversations. And hysterical but ultimately unnecessary conversations.

Even if we're all losing a bit of the lives we had back home, we're managing to survive our new ones we've made for ourselves out here in the desert.