I’d forgotten how sticky DC is in the summer. The return of the sweat is a reminder that I’ve been here nearly a year—unofficially from the end of last June when I worked in the mountains of Virginia and drove to DC on weekends and officially since I unintentionally stumbled into a job here in August and moved here with one day’s notice. This city has been a wonderful surprise. Everything else has been difficult. I do not think I’m the only one relieved that the school year has ended and we have a moment to breathe.
I spent last weekend in Providence for my 5th year college reunion during which I slept about 6 hours in a span of 64 and walked 30 miles. My general state of delirium may have played a role in the intensity of the experience, but I don’t think that’s the only reason that reunion hit me much harder than it did most people. Maybe the same can be said of college itself. Maybe college wasn’t such a transformative place to people for whom this was the plan all along— those who went through the half-million dollar preschool then college prep school followed by the Ivy League and six-figure-first-job circuit—the people who expected the person they are now was always the person they were going to be. Maybe to them college is just a memory of fun and stress and relationships and strangeness and the things I imagine all college experiences are, and their lives move on in a linear fashion with those years a memory solidly in the past. One friend said that it felt weird being back because once you leave school, you leave this version of yourself and don’t think about it much anymore because you are no longer that person.
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| Welcome home |
It’s harder for those of us who the past never lets go of. I’m not sure I’ve fully left that place or that I ever entirely will. I think Brown means something different to those of us for whom it was life-altering, to those of us for whom this was inconceivable. 9 years later and 5 years away and the opportunity to go to that school does not feel less shocking.
Reunions are painted as this euphoric time of reminiscing and reliving memories with your forever-friends. Social media tells us this is true. (I want to ask all of the people of social media if anything has changed in their lives now that makes being together different than it was 5 years ago. Surely there is someone it is awkward for you to see here? Surely your memories of this place are not so straightforward. Surely no person alive is so self-assured.) Then again, I guess my social media doesn’t portray something entirely different. But social media unintentionally lies, and of course it’s more complicated than that.
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| Prospect Park |
Reunion was a lot of nostalgia. Sometimes it was that euphoric kind, and sometimes it was the sad type. A friend told me once that he believes true nostalgia can only exist when you wish you could relive an experience differently than it happened. There are things I do regret missing at Brown. I spent 4 years there as an intensely private person (which has perhaps not changed so much) with one or two best friends and only a couple more roommates/friends I felt close to. I spent the first year of college hardly speaking to anyone. In retrospect, I fear people may have perceived me as a stuck up snob. In reality, I was painfully shy and intimidated by people I believed were way too cool to be my friends. I was so busy observing everyone else that I let almost no one know me, except for those couple of people who made it their mission to try (which I will always be grateful for).
For years after college, I couldn’t forgive myself for missing out on friendships I might have had if I hadn’t been too shy to pursue them until it was too late. It took me 5 years to feel like maybe we can give ourselves second chances. Maybe it’s not too late after all. Maybe that realization was the best part of reunion.
But I believe there’s nostalgia in missing something exactly the way that it was, too. Since graduating, I’ve only visited Providence once a couple of years ago. There was no one in town that I knew, which took away the emotional impact of it. A blizzard hit, and I had to leave early, but I remember not minding much because without the people, there was nothing else I needed there. I wrote a post about how Providence felt like home before Brown did, how I had to grow into the people there before they felt like home to me, and about what home means and how we can have more than one.
This time, I was back on campus with hundreds of my classmates, and glimpses of my 18-year-old self reemerged complete with the social anxiety, insomnia, and self-consciousness. 18-year-old me was the boldest of cowards and the most restless of loners. Did I really live like this everyday? Always so hyper-alert, always looking over my shoulder, always feeling surrounded by people I wanted to be sure I saw first so I could decide how to react? I spent last weekend trying to sleep in a dorm bed/brick-like-plank on the side of campus I’d never lived in, listening to downstair’s party music, wondering how I slept at all in my four years there, and remembering that I didn’t sleep all that much, in fact. I felt the same in ways I didn’t want to feel the same.
Luckily my 27-year-old self was also there to step in. My 27-year-old self recognized how incredible it is that eating 1:00am pizza with friends that random housing placed me next to as a freshman does not feel different than it did 9 years ago. Neither does trying Cambodian food for the first time with the same people who made me try my first taste of sushi/Greek yogurt/thai/salad-dressing-that-wasn’t-ranch (thanks, guys).There’s always a comfort in having friends with whom you can pick up right where you left off.
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| WaterFire |
My 27-year-old self still needed to get up too early to go to my favorite coffee shops and walk around the city alone, the way I fell in love with it the first time back when it was the first city I’d ever lived in and places like Manhattan and DC felt so far from my reality. Providence is much smaller now, but no less beautiful. I thought of the other writers I’ve known who fell in love with this city with all of it’s strangeness and poetry. I thought of the first writing workshop I ever took during freshman year before I wrote words for anyone else to read. (I will forever be indebted to you, Michael Keenan.) I felt so clearly again how happy I was to be here. How never for one second was I not so happy to be here.
My 27-year-old self missed people. Because it is painful to try reliving memories alone that you made with others. Because you cannot separate memories of a place with memories of the people who made it home for you, and because that version of home can never exist in quite the same way it once did.
I have never felt so strongly about a place as I felt (still feel) about Brown. There was never a time in my life when I felt so constantly on edge, so self-conscious, so expectant. There was never another time in my life when someone might knock on my door at 3am to tell me it was snowing (thanks, Eric). There was never another time in my life when I spent hours painting pictures on the art building staircase, or sneaking into the old gym’s pool in the middle of the night, or climbing roofs and exploring tunnels under the dorm. Apart from grad school, there has never been another time that I’ve felt so fascinated by every person I met. There was never another time I would have passed up studying abroad because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving that place. That I had standing breakfast dates every Friday, frequent 3 course dinner parties with my best friend, my “own table” in my favorite coffee shops, and a city I felt belonged to me. There was always a feeling of transience, of changing fast enough to notice it, of being afraid of what happened when it was gone. There was never another time when I learned so much from every person I met or when I felt so far from home but also like I was exactly where I belonged. I love that school no less today than I loved it 9 years ago.
It is hard to say who I would have been without Brown or to pinpoint the specific ways in which it changed me. It is hard to list the things I have to thank the school, students, and faculty for. One thing that Brown taught me in such a tangible and lasting way is to be bold in caring about things that matter. It was not surprising that every speech during commencement got political. In Daveed Digg’s Baccalaureate speech, he said, “What these times really need are people who challenge all explanations. Who never thought outside the box because they never accepted the premise that there was a box… We need your new ideas because our old ones have made a mess of things.” I’m glad this was my reunion year so I could hear those speeches. Because I do believe in the young people in this country. Not just at Brown, but colleges and high schools throughout America. I believe they will pull us out of this mess we’re in.
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| Walking through the Van Wickle Gates the first time |
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| And 9 years later |
I got back to DC on Monday and couldn’t decide if I felt like I was leaving home or coming home. I went to my last full day of work on Tuesday. I won’t be returning to this job next year, and there’s a lot of anxiety in not knowing what happens next or if I’ll be here next year or somewhere else. But I feel lucky to have been here this year, even when I might have once imagined living here during this election as torture. For now I will read all the books I wanted to be reading during the school year and try to write some things for the first time in 9 months.
