I came home awkward and bitter towards my parents. I saw that they couldn't give me, ever, what those kids' parents could grant effortlessly in a month's allowance or a well-placed phone call. Humiliating as the year had been, it made it impossible for me to stay in my home town for good, impossible to forget the other ways I could be in the world. I had been AWAY. I had been a learner, a student of great ideas and powerful thinkers. I had taken the trip outside and was forever changed by it. Now, I had to leave.

In the first strange month of my return home my parents built me a desk and shelves for all the books. They framed a map I brought back of the Parthenon and got me bookends and a study light. None of us knew what I was to do with these things, it just seemed required now that I was the owner of such large, impressive-looking books. They were awed by them, held them in reverence and dread just as I did-- though I wouldn't admit to it. They were my trophies, the stuffed animal heads on my wall. This was the proof that their sacrifice to send me away from the place where I was raised had been worth it.

We all circled those bookcases like hounds after an animal we had never come upon before. I, as their owner, would shut the door to my room and open their pages again and again. They were proof to me that I had been "somewhere," and to my parents they were a sign of how I had become different and unknown to them, how I had traveled without them to places they could not imagine. It was a sign of how we had changed and grown apart.

I was not duplicating the motions of the women in my family, each female child moving slightly away from the woman who birthed her, though less than it seemed initially, once she became an adult and settled in. I would rechart the map my family and I had propped up in our minds. I had been born to grow up to have children, marry and live out my life as a modern version of the women who had come before me. Now it was clear I would not. I was becoming a survivor.