Rivers and Roads - The Head and The Heart

“A year from now, we’ll all be gone, all our friends will move away,
And they’re going to better places, but our friends will be gone away”

At my elementary school, the younger classrooms were on the first floor, and 4th-8th grade were on the second.  I remember the jump from 3rd to 4th grade was a scary one.  We had finally conquered the first floor, towering above the first and second graders, and now we would have to go upstairs, where our classrooms would be the only refuge from the middle school stampede of the hallway.  It was terrifying.  The upstairs hallway looked so long, the lockers so high, the exits a whole floor away.  After 8th grade, though, I was at the other end of the hallway, and it had gotten so much smaller, and it wasn’t just the 7th grade growth spurt.  It seemed ridiculous that I would ever fear this place.  I knew that hallway backwards and forwards, I recognized everyone in the halls, and I felt comfortable there. 

That made high school all the scarier.  I’d be going from a two-story private school where I knew everyone to a three-story, 4-winged public school with 2,000 strangers.  The building was massive, and I got lost no less than four times on the first day.  (It took me a week or two to realize that the room number corresponded to what floor it was on.  For a while I was making complete guesses about where the hell Room B251 might be.)  By graduation, though, our class ran the place.  The three stories and four wings seemed small; I had been in most of the rooms, knew where the best drinking fountains were, and recognized almost a quarter of the people in the hallway (there were still way too many kids.)

So when I got to Boston, I didn’t let the city campus get to me.  Every time I got lost or felt lost (or watched Lost, and then felt more lost,) I tried to convince myself it would all seem so tiny in a few years.

It didn’t really work.  There was no way I could believe that this mile-long stretch of buildings, six lanes of traffic with a train in the middle, complex system of classes and social life would ever look small.  This will never be home.  35,000 people from every country imaginable will never feel like a community.

Still, it kind of happened.  Don’t ask me how, I guess that’s just how things work.

It’s always just when you’re getting used to a place that the time comes to move on.  My family has never moved houses, which is probably for the best, because I can’t really handle change like that.  I had a hard enough time moving to the room across the hall.  Last week, my roommates and I finished moving out of the suite we’ve lived in for two years, and next year we’re moving off-campus to the culturally confused, trashy hipster ghetto that is Allston.  It will be a whole new living situation to get used to.  Even weirder is that a lot of my friends are graduating and moving to LA, and I’ll probably be there soon enough.  How long does it take for a place to become a home?  Do you have to give up an old home to completely accept the new one?

I always said that when I’m at school, my life at home feels like a dream, and when I’m at home my school life feels like a dream.  Every time I come home after a long time at school, I get stuck for a while in that bewildered state right after waking up, when you aren’t really sure where you are or what you’re doing.  Movies are also like dreams, so when we went on vacation to Myrtle Beach last year and saw Inception, it was like a dream within a dream within a dream.  It’s hard to reconcile these things.

So next year we’ll all be going different places; the home we found in Boston will be ripped away from us, soon to become just a memory of a dream we once had.  It’s scary to start over somewhere else, whether it’s across the hall, across campus, or across the country.  But I like to think that every new place is just like the second floor of my elementary school.  Once you’ve traveled enough, maybe the whole world seems tiny, and everywhere you go feels like home.  If I can conquer the rivers and roads of this city, the future doesn’t seem too big or too scary.