| Wrote this after the Halloween trip and dumped it on the Tumblr.
Yesterday, Irksome Irviner made a post that reminded me of it.
In six weeks, I never adopted the habit of referring to the dorm
room as “home.” The associations were still too strong for me: “Home”
was a buttercream house with roses out front at the end of a suburban
cul-de-sac, not this cramped, cluttered living space shared with three girls. Perhaps I do return to this place every night, perhaps I have made this address my north star. But it’s not home. I live here, but I don’t inhabit it.
A while back, I said that nothing is so stabilising at university as
the first storm, when you flee under a concrete partition to take a
breath and look at the absolute hellhole roiling an arm’s length away,
numbing you through three layers of rain-soaked clothing (no, SoCal did not prepare me for this at all), and you see that this
is where you’re spending the next four years of your life, through all
the barmy monsoons and the irritable equinoxes.
I contest that.
Nothing is so stabilising as the first trip “back down/up,” to the
place where you used to live. Where you left everybody else behind.
Little compares to walking into a bedroom and seeing everything as you
left it, and finding that everything has stayed the same, but you’ve changed, and that’s why you’re seeing all this as if from behind an observation window.
Yes, I used to live here. I used to sleep in that bed every night, spend my hours at that desk.
And, when the bags are dropped and I’m sitting on the edge of the
bed, breathing in that house-smell that’s familiar and comforting (but nothing like Davis),
I can’t help but make comparisons: The residence halls are never this
quiet, especially after ten on a Friday night. The silence pounds on my
sternum, digs holes in my ears with a melon scooper. Even the pipes at
university are loud, I realise belatedly.
At the intersection of Baldwin and –Naomi, is it?– I look at the
storefronts whose names I know like the first three rows of the
periodic table while I wait at the red light with a pulse as familiar
as a heartbeat, and I know that this is how things must be from now on.
After seventeen years of recognising few streets better than these, I can
only be a visitor. I can grasp for moments (long weekends,
Thanksgivings, winter hols) to replenish the memory, but
I will live the majority of the next four years some four hundred miles
away from this secluded suburbia. And after that, there’s a whole
rest-of-the-world for exploring, and Arcadia will become the “hometown.”
“Oh, hometown. That is where I grew up.
For seventeen years, I didn’t know what I had.”
All said, it was nice to go home.
|
Maybe I just have an overriding preference for classical, and nothing so for jazz. Maybe the video sound quality is just really crappy. 
