And gumdrops probably make shitty shingles.

          Being home is strange. I could probably stop right there, because anyone who's lived away from his childhood home understands the basic, essential weirdness of returning to live under that roof again, if even for a short time.
          The names of the streets around my neighborhood are familiar, but at the same time distant - like remembering the names of made-up countries from a book you read a lot as a kid. You used to know it well, used to have an image of it in your head, but now it's gone fuzzy.
          I'm sitting here looking at my bedroom. There's a lot more pink in here than I'm comfortable with. But then, a lot of it is my mother's doing - I never liked pink. I'd hoped that my parents would have turned my room into a guest bedroom, or a storage room. Something with utility. But I come back from school and it's preserved, like a museum. Old music boxes (which I used to collect - or rather, which my mother used to collect for me when I was three years old) are lined up in a glass display case. My bookshelf has mysteriously acquired bookends to keep everything orderly, and one shelf is still full of cheap jewelry and framed pictures. Even the bulletin board I put together in middle school, complete with awkward photos of my adolescent friends and movie ticket stubs, still hangs untouched on the wall. It's actually kind of ... scary? It's like in movies or crime shows, when someone's kid dies and the parents keep the room exactly as it was. Like they're expecting the kid to come back, like changing the room will somehow jinx it, be an act of doubt, sentence him to death all over again.
          My brother's room was transformed as soon as he left for college. I think the lack of change in mine (down to the pillows on my bed) is the manifestation of the hope my parents nurture that I'm not actually an adult, not actually leaving. They've told me that I'm welcome to live at home after school. This is in stark contrast to the time they spent nagging my brother to find his own place. This is probably because I've always been "the good kid" - I'm not much hassle to have around.
          Being here is strange, slightly uncomfortable. I'm not who I was (this is also an obvious statement). But everything here, the walls and memories and even they way people react to me, it seems to think I am. It all acts like a corset or a vice - I feel squeezed back into a shape I no longer conform to.

          I'm actually kind of relieved by all of this discomfort and claustrophobia. It's reassuring - I am ready to get out there. I don't feel at all inclined to come home again after school. It doesn't seem like it'd be a respite, breathing space before starting up my own life (full of bills and responsibilities and paperwork). It feels like it would be limiting.
          Oh, that's what it is. It's like the gingerbread house from the fairy tale. Tempting and easy. I mean, I'm not saying my mother is going to eat me or anything. But. You know. I don't want to be given everything, or coddled (a word which, funnily enough, can mean both being treated gently and also being cooked just below the boiling point). I don't want sugar and candy. I don't want easy.
          Give me those wicked witches and dark woods and hungry, trickster wolves.