What is it like?

     What is it like to be homeless?
     I am soon to find out.
     A home: it's a warm, welcoming, familiar place. Memories that have ties to kindergarten years, a room will worn by the aging of a growing child, a food-filled fridge, clothes neatly washed and folded, shoulders to cry on, pockets to take loans from, and brothers to nag on.
     This is a home; my home.
     I depart from this home and move into an apartment. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and six girls. I buy the food that goes in the fridge, I wash the clothes that take home in the basket, the shoulders are dry and the pockets empty. What's more, I know I will move on. This is no home. It is a shelter. I live here to learn.
     And so I'll move on. New apartment next semester. New girls, new foodless cupboards, new empty memories. This is no home. The stains are unnamed, the sounds unfamiliar, the smells, hopefully unheard of.
     And now it is time to return. This year is over.
     So I return to the place that once was home. In a way it still is. The food will be plentiful and the brothers still irritable; but it won't be the same. My memories have taken root in different soil. This isn't my home. However familiar and warm, it's not where I live. This isn't where I will stay.
     I'm not the kind of girl you normally find afraid. In fact, I take pride in my fearlessness. Spiders are revolting, but it's nothing a piece of paper and a Dixie-cup can't handle. Put me on the edge of a cliff and I'll laugh at the flip-flop my stomach makes. At age four my favorite movie was "Jurassic Park." The scene where the T-Rex eats the guy off the toilet sent me into hysterics.
     Today I am scared. Scared doesn't do this feeling justice; I am terrified. I am walking away from this sensation, this feeling of home that has gotten me through 18 years of life, and I'm stepping into a lifestyle completely void of it.
     I feel lost in this sea of people, with no connections and no bow to grasp onto. Somehow I'm expected to embrace this, to dive headfirst with my hands in the air and a smile on my face.
     I am not destitute. I am not alone. I am not an unbathed beggar living beneath the bridge; but I am homeless. And that scares me.