Terminal Nostalgia
A love letter to Yale.
Dear Yale,
Changing my “current city” from New Haven to San Francisco feels like changing my relationship status. Sitting on the hardwood floor of my summer sublet, I am self-conscious and unsure. These tiny clicks and keyboard strokes are my first real acknowledgement that I have left college behind. As far as I know, I will never live in New Haven again. Sure, I’ll be back for coffee dates, wushu practices, random meet-ups. You and I will see each other, but at a distance. From now on you will be a former lover, and I’m scared that I’ll be the one who can’t let go. In a few months, the campus will be full of freshmen, and I can’t shake the feeling that you will have moved on, that you now belong to another generation of students who are about to fall in love with you for the first time. Someone is going to move into my room. Someone is going to sleep on my bed, stick command hooks on my wall, put a poster over the spot where I accidentally ripped off the paint because I suck at command-hook removal. On the couch where Elisa and I sat and drank tea, other kids are going to sit and stay up late and chat about nothing and feel completely, overwhelmingly content. But I don’t want them to. I want my room, my walls, my couch to be wholly and utterly mine. And part of me wants you to be mine, too. Even though I rolled my eyes at overeager prefrosh during Bulldog Days, I wonder now if I hadn’t gotten my emotions wrong. I wasn’t annoyed at them: I was jealous. Jealous that they were about to embark on the most exciting time of their lives, and that our relationship was almost over.
I thought I would write my reflections before I left, so that I could capture my feelings while I was still in New Haven. But dead week came and went, and between the packing and awkward parental encounters and last-minute alcohol clearance parties, it never happened—which is perhaps a more adequate description of college than I could ever offer. You kept me me so busy and full and alive that I couldn’t stop to comprehend, and even now, thousands of miles away, I still find myself at a loss for words. I wondered, a few months ago, if we would all wake up on Tuesday morning after commencement feeling empty and alone. In reality, I didn’t sleep on Monday night because I was too busy packing and haggling with Kevin to take my un-packable things, and on Tuesday I was too preoccupied with getting my parents to the airport on time. Before I knew it, I was home—my other home, the one still listed on my Facebook profile. Being at home is different when you aren’t there waiting for me on the other side of the country, when there’s nothing to go back to when break ends. A few minutes after I finished moving my suitcases upstairs, I sat down on my bedroom carpet and found myself crying, filled with some vague, unspeakable sense of loss coupled with embarrassment, because for Christ’s sake I am twenty-two years old, and what do I have to cry about?
There wasn’t a specific moment when we said goodbye—no last kiss, drawn-out hugs or break-up sex. There were a thousand moments, starting with the first photo I took of my friends hanging out in my common room last August, when I wondered how many more photographs I’d snap in which we would all be together. There was the hasty final paper I submitted for Poetry Since 1950 which, to my dismay, ended up being my very last piece of academic writing. There was my Writing Concentration Project, which was supposed to be the culminating work of my undergraduate career, and the bottle of strawberry Andre I shared with Marvin after I finally stopped revising and turned the damn thing in. There was the A- I got on my Writing Concentration project a few weeks later, after which I sat down on the curb in front of Eleanor’s apartment and wondered if this is all I really am: pretty good, but always a few steps shy of excellence. There was the Monday before finals ended when I stopped midway through lunch and realized that I was eating my very last meal in Stiles, the unremarkable morning in which I unwittingly ordered my last chai latte from Blue State, the final encounters–in the library, at the gym, on the street–that I didn’t realize were goodbyes.
In the endless series of Lasts, I wonder what it is I really miss about you. It has to be more than just fair-trade coffee and insurmountable puddles on Elm Street, more than my classes and professors, more than even my friends. But the harder I think about you, the more elusive you are. There are few moments in which I believe that writing is futile–that some things are truly ineffable–but this comes pretty close. I somehow managed to crank out 50 pages of nonfiction in order to graduate, but I can’t even write two pages on the past four years of my life. I can’t believe I’m even trying. I want desperately to say something that hasn’t already been said, to capture what you mean to me—to commemorate my own specific memories, and not anyone else’s. But perhaps that’s the beautiful thing about commencement: everyone goes through it together, and everyone is secretly lost and afraid.
I wanted you to be mine, yet you belong to all of us, and to none of us. My parents asked me what I took away from my time at Yale, and I have no fucking clue. Maybe it’s this: there is no singular Yale experience, and just because I didn’t get into any societies or get elected to Phi Beta Kappa or have over 500+ LinkedIn connections doesn’t mean that I don’t belong.
Or maybe it’s this: cities and towns and campuses are made of people, and they’re the ones I ought to be writing to instead, the people whose memories I will carry across borders and overseas. That if I were to be completely honest with myself, I have known all along that Yale cannot be confined to courtyards or buildings or cross streets, but it’s so much easier to lump my fears and emotions and acknowledgments into a single, all-encompassing four-letter name, because if I really stop to unpack each and every moment, I will never finish writing. That four years ago, I stepped onto this campus and swore I would leave my mark. But instead it is you who have left your mark on me.
Or this. You have shown me that there are spaces on this earth where I can be free and whole and at home with myself. Two weeks ago, I left New Haven terrified that I won’t find this peace anywhere else. I’ve only been in San Francisco for five days, but it feels like I might never belong. Still, I shuffle down the street in my flip flops and jeans and second-day hair as if this place were mine, because the only thing to do is to keep walking, marching along to the silent hope that some day, I will fall in love again.