The blind corners of the parking deck make for an exhilarating game of morning roulette. I imagine my 2005 Mercury Mariner slithering between the floors, destined to secure our third floor spot on the wall that looks out over College Ave. My car, like many others in the deck, exhibits a strange behavior: an attraction to the light. Despite the University’s tendency to oversell parking spaces, shady yet preferable spaces are left vacant. The cars are addicted to the sunlight; their bias revealing oil drip scars between each unoccupied set of yellow lines.
The walls of this parking deck have seen me. They’ve seen me, head pressed to the steering wheel with drawn out sobs; painfully reconciling myself from my mother’s lack of connection. They’ve seen me beaming after an exam has gone well; tossing my bag in the passenger seat and playing my favorite Bad Bunny song full blast, and they’ve seen the days in between. The days where I park in just about the same exact spot, lock my car, and then walk back to make sure it’s locked. The days that seem all so similar that I can’t hold onto any salient memories. Repetition makes me feel divorced from uniqueness. As I trudge along my walk to the opposite end of campus – a walk I’ve rehearsed almost every single day I’ve attended this school – I begin to feel consumed by assimilation. Assimilation not to others, but to a version of myself created by circumstance.
Today, the sunshine greets me as a beacon. It provides me with nothing more than what it is. The same as every day it shines, it warms my skin, and decides where I will park my car. It follows me along my walk; ignorant to the freezing temperatures of the air. I want to tuck my head down against the wind and watch my feet as they cross the familiar terrains. But the sun lifts my chin, and puts the shape of a smile on my face as my eyes adjust to the beaming rays. This walk has not always been automatic. I was once a freshman using Google Maps as a necessary crutch to identify buildings that I’ve now spent weeks worth of my life inside. What was once a mystery feels now so elementary.
Growth is something I’ve been fighting for. Every day the question grows closer in relevance –“Who are you going to be?” And I search for it. In internships, in the different majors I could choose, in LinkedIn profiles. It has to be somewhere. While I’ve spent my first two years of college sifting through the sands of the essence of myself my fingers fail to grasp anything outstanding in all that looks the same.
On this walk, I feel for the first time at peace with the question. Not because I’ve decided I’m going to become a lawyer, or I met a mentor that makes Information Technology seem really exciting, but because I understand how futile it would be to answer it. Aren’t I already someone? With the sun as my companion, and familiar Rutgers pictures dressing my scene, I come to an awareness that now I am as much of me as I ever can be, or ever have been.
I’ve been looking for something different to tell me what I’m going to be. Something to wake me from the dream state of every day, and dictate a path into fruitfulness, in light of all the excellent qualities I possess. There’s been a piece of me missing. I’ve been walking around empty and lacking, or so I’ve believed. But when I remember that I am whole the totality of every day shatters into unique fragments onto which I project who I am. My qualities step forward into my light; exhibiting their own strange behaviors, and painting the path onto which I continue to build who I am.