Leave home to go home

Nicole Hennessy

Tomorrow I’ll be back in Kent. Leaving Columbus is going to be so hard. I feel like I make more sense here. The fashion is better, the people are friendlier and the music scene is amazing. There are so many reasons why Columbus is a great city, more than I care to list and a lot that I’ll never admit.

When I began writing this column at the beginning of the semester, I planned to write about state government, something my classmates and I have supposedly been studying in the Statehouse. Though, the circumstances I found myself in seemed much more interesting.

Last week, I wrote the most abstract column I’ve ever written. It was an experimental thing I’ve been meaning to try for quite some time. Someone commented on the atrociousness of it, which is an opinion they are fully entitled to. Though, hate my stuff, love it or don’t care at all, I’m glad to have drifted from the readymade, college student op-ed pieces that litter the forum pages of every university’s newspaper. I hope I was able to give people a reprieve from the ordinary and interrupt their busy lives for just a few moments, giving them the chance to just breathe.

We don’t just dream, we wonder. Opinion does not have to be limited to commentary on astonishing, shocking, dreadful, outrageous, egregious or flamboyant news stories. It does not have to be in response to something someone said or did. I think it can be in response to simply existing. It can be a lamenting for a jukebox song that played while you weren’t paying attention. It can be a record of changing thought processes. Substance is subjective. I guess if you are looking for information and think you know where to find it, you will be informed. However, I hope some people, somewhere, still suffer the effects of lingering, beautiful segments of sentence.

Hurling me toward my destination tomorrow, time denies me a pause option. I dread having to live among all the pretty, patchouli soaked “hippies” or endure every 12-hour long Monday of my 18 credit hour saturated semester.

It seems like as soon as I get on Interstate 71, all the music will be gone.

Nicole Hennessy is a senior magazine journalism major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].