It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day where you stop feeling like just another person smushed on an LX and start thinking of New Brunswick as your home. It’s even harder to remember how to find that sense of distance again once you realize that home has an expiration date, and it’s rapidly approaching. All of a sudden you’re a senior, and graduation has snuck up on you.
Come May, I’ll box up my furniture and calculators and old textbooks that I was too lazy to sell back, and with them, I’ll box up this chunk of my life and shift my attention elsewhere. Sure, it’s been a long time coming, but it still feels jarring. It’s like being told you’ve outgrown your favorite sweatshirt that you’re convinced fits just fine. In fact, you’re wearing it right now. Who says its time has come?
It is strange when you think about it, this place where they allow you to come in as a clueless eighteen-year-old to learn about whatever you want, and befriend whomever you want, and become a marathoner, or a videographer, or a raging Netflix addict or some combination thereof. At the beginning, the possibilities seem endless. Everything is in flux and you can feel the fluidity in the air, sense that a tiptoe down one path might send you careening toward a direction you’d never considered before. And so you poke around and dip your toes into various pools that seem inviting, and sure why not a cryptography class, maybe my life will be the Da Vinci Code, okay maybe not.
Slowly, imperceptibly, you settle into your groove. You stumble upon the best places to study, you learn to avoid the College Hall bus stop at all costs. And you cling to the notion that you can make your choices and keep your options open too. But what you find is that the swirling fluidity is finite. These opportunities, these dew-dropped possibilities do not stay bright and fresh forever; you either snatch them while they are ripe or you watch them wither and die. Sometimes you wonder what they might have become.
Then you forget about them, until one day you turn a corner and bam something triggers a memory: your old roommate walking down the street, a line from a song you used to listen to on the bus. Even loose flyers for restaurants you swore you’d go to at some point. Why did you choose so many meals of Hot Pockets or crumbly granola bars instead, anyway? Don’t you know there’s a whole wide city around you to explore?
I am nostalgic for both the shiny newness of college and the worn comfort of having lived in it for a while. Every walkway and every building is a flashback to the things that weren’t and the things that were, and I am going to miss them all.
Where does it all go when we leave? Can I keep it, shove it in a drawer, and rest assured knowing that I can always dredge it back up again later? Freeze-dry it and thaw it out once I’ve grown enough perspective and sense to take advantage of it all?
Three and a half years have whooshed by, and there is less than one meager half to go. After that, I will no longer be taunted by the ghosts of possibilities lurking around every corner, because they will all be swept into irrelevancy. Nor will it matter that I know the weekend bus schedule by heart, or where to get the best frozen yogurt, or any other extraneous details that I’ve romanticized as a consequence of roaming the same streets for so long. These are just tiny segments of whatever these past years have been, but there are a million other segments like this that come bubbling up in my mind, and I wonder what they are worth now besides this relentless, stabbing nostalgia. It makes me feel old. How do you reconcile with yourself and accept that something can still have value even if it’s past and gone?
I have nestled myself into this city, this planet of a school that once seemed too hopelessly large and inhospitable for comfort. Now I see that it is just pockets of people all stitched together in haphazard but wonderful ways; crossing paths, doubling back and overlapping as we muddle around trying to figure it all out. And I suppose it’s too much to ask that I take this whole patchwork mess with me, or even that all the loose ends be neatly tied up.
Sometimes I’m afraid that when I actually have to vacate the premises, when I have to lift myself up from this campus and move on, a piece of me will stay here, refreshing the familiarities and the ones that got away. But I would rather remain woven into this school than drift on having never cared enough to take it all in.
Kristin Baresich