Living Away

This is going to be a problem

I think as I stare across the room on the third floor

Eyeing the last tenant to enter the apartment.

She’s nothing like what I’ve seen before

Her hair,

Her scant clothes,

Confidence oozes from her like abrasive sandpaper.

The semester gunned the start of my first year;

I was pretty sheltered

And my roommates proved it so.

Not that to them it much mattered.

The dishes,

Indistinguishable squeaks,

Shrills from behind closed doors.

This isn’t right.

            This isn’t home.

Time passes on

Life surges and drags down

I get angry

            I accept

                        I change so I won’t drown

                        In the problems that aren’t mine.

But I grow.

Through the cracks of their lives,

My roommates push me to look beyond;

 I see past the presupposed

Beyond what I used to keep us apart.

At the end of the year,

I feel fulfilled!

            Things clicked

And I made connections.

            I made a few friends

But clung to my seclusion.

                        This was my rabbit hole,

                        The niche I had found.

It didn’t use to be home

                        (It’s still not)

            Yet home isn’t home either.

Unwittingly, I became new

I let myself be.

And grew up.

            I. Became. Me.