Every time I come home, it always reminds me that time keeps moving even if we’re not here to see it. There’s a new building up in a shopping center or a new family moved in across the street. A few less friends to visit and a bright new pergola (fancy overhang) in my front yard, or of course–courtesy of my dad–a new clock to be found somewhere in the house.

Each time I visit, there’s something new to whisper, “time has passed, don’t you see?” Even if it’s just in the way my dog sleeps a little more or the cool air I got used to here over break hit 102 this week instead.

And in seeing all, the small pieces that make up what I see of the world, I wonder what the world looks back and sees of me.

After all, the only thing that matters is our perspectives, our vantage points. You only see the changes if you’re looking. Chances are, you weren’t looking at me.

Nothing about me, nothing specifically, could tell you what’s happened in the last three months of my life. Just so you know, I did pass all my classes; surprisingly so considering the amount of things I was juggling. Truly, I don’t know how I passed a single one of them.

But I did. Just like I spent another quarter in my job and am technically a quarter of english classes away from graduation. I am.

I am so much of what you don’t see.

The new houses and buildings and people here up in town? Those are the skills, the memories, the hurt, the passion, and the knowledge that have built small homes in who I am. It’s a new complex of professional development built into what is becoming my repertoire, a new attitude around skipping classes or getting sleep because our priorities change over time just like we do.

But none of you can really see that. Nor the friendships built and lost. Trust strengthened or loosened. Threads between my expectations and my reality; they’re thinning as one grows farther away from the other.

Every time I come home, it’s a different girl walking through the front door.

And it’s a shame that maybe some people won’t get to see that.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions–as much as I’d love to catch up with all of the people I miss and want to see, some don’t have the time, the capacity, the opportunity, or even the want. Some of you just can’t.

Sure, I can try to cover it all in a blog post, in this site that has somehow catalogued the last three years of my life. But it can’t catch everything, define the change and the process and the truth about my life for you; nothing can but me.

After all, we’re all liars aren’t we?

Think about it, everything we say or do, it is because we see or know things to be a certain way. But only from our perspective. No two people will ever see the same thing happen even if they are all watching the same event occur.

The proof cannot come from a testament of what happened or even how we individually change because of it. You would have to look at all of us to really understand what happened, to pieces together each individual change as a collective of the aftermath and the why of what occurred in the first place.

Unfortunately, I cannot fill in what you all see or think unless you tell me. As for you, all you get is me. Take it or leave it.

Hopefully though, you’ll keep betting on me and take it. because as always, things are changing. I can’t guarentee what these posts are going to look like this summer, but I have a feeling they’re going to be a little different.

I can’t tell you what girl is leaving home again this weekend or which one will be back later, but I can tell you that you’ll find out.

Stick around and find out, find out with me, since you know that I have no idea either. And this week has given me time to think about what I can do or where this girl can go over summer to really make the most of what I’ve been given.

I only get this one final summer as an undergrad.

And well, they say we only live once.

Maybe that’s true; but maybe in the mix of perspectives and truths we all hold about a single event we call life, maybe the moments can be infinite.

Let’s find out together.