Every year around this time, a strange feeling comes over our campus. It isn’t the kind of strange feeling that you might get when your cell phone vibrates violently at the bottom of your backpack during class, nor is it the sort of feeling you got around midterms when Monday somehow became Thursday.

This is the kind of feeling that only comes once a year, when respectable, accomplished adults see you wearing a towel and cow-print slippers while picking up milk from your friend’s apartment at nine in the morning.

You may have noticed the sticker campaign that was used to spread knowledge of planned events for the Homecoming weekend. I did, and wondered: “What on Earth is ‘What is it? What is What?'” As it turns out, it (what?) leads to the What is What website where the front-page video blitzkriegs viewers with approximately 24 questions and 22 answers in under two and a half minutes. This is to great effect, and stimulates interest in the week’s events for viewers who would have otherwise felt aversion or indifference towards them.

But more than video guessing games, Homecoming is the time to welcome back the people that we ourselves will be in five, 10, or 40 years. Keep an eye out at social events and their respective after-parties, and you’re sure to run in to someone who went to Guilford “when it was good.” Guilford is, of course, “not good anymore,” they will say, and then generously take time proportional to their blood alcohol content to explain, in depth, precisely what our cozy institution is lacking.

Not lacking, however, is a sandstorm-onslaught from our college’s marketing department. Despite this, something much more meaningful blooms during Homecoming.

It is the return of old friends, with new stories and livelihoods, that may offer us a glimpse into the post-Guilford world. And with their fleeting return to grace our lovely campus, faces of Guilford’s past beg us to wonder: how are our individual and collective decisions in the present shaping the future? In the depths of self-examination, we may find ourselves saying, “I don’t know,” then returning to mass-texting during class periods.

Soon, we’ll be saying hello to our rightful place on the rock-climbing wall: three or four feet off of the ground. In time, we’ll forget those bothersome memories of the moon-bounces, which, after five or six funnel cakes, were far less bouncy than usual this year. We’ll forget that small gang of children who were seen mocking innocent people, ruthlessly shouting that I was too old to be at said moon-bounce until I left in tears.