for the love of a place
it’s the end of my sixth quarter in college, my second year, my halfway mark. i don’t know how to process it all, which has led to a truly unacceptable amount of time spent doomscrolling and watching instagram reels for five seconds before flipping to the next, because i can’t bare to think about something long enough to develop feelings for it. tells you all you need to know about college.
there’s so much love, joy, and pain in this place. the roads i’ve run down, the spaces i’ve entered, the smiles i’ve exchanged with perfect strangers on these streets. but no one’s really a stranger, because this is stanford, and it’s a small enough for us all to feel a drop of self-importance but big enough for us all to think we exist in the bottom half. this morning i was walking to my last section of the week, for a data science class i wish i’d invested in more heavily. under the arches of main quad, and with the morning sun so especially pretty in a way i hadn't thought to notice when my weeks were faster, i thought to myself, ‘there’s just no way i can ever leave.’
it’s hard to explain the magic of somewhere to someone who hasn’t felt the pulse of sandstone beneath their feet. i’m a campus tour guide, where i get paid to blab away at prospective students and show them around our 8180 acre school (i only take them through two and a half miles). i try to be honest about it all – the academic rigor, the opportunities that are everywhere but often hidden in plain sight, the social life that was bigger than the world to me freshman year but has since started to feel more obligatory than exciting, more stifling than stimulating. dark rooms are just rooms without the person that you’re looking for, and crowds are crowds and sweat is sweat when you know the pit in your stomach won’t leave until he does.
next year i’ll be a resident assistant in a freshman dorm and i hope to keep it real, to be the mom ra whose room is always open for tea and tears. i sometimes wonder if i’m sticking around for something that’s not coming, if i go everywhere and grab everything because i’m afraid i’ll never be the same if i let the minutes pass me by. i think about my friends, people i met a year and a half ago, who are now pillars of my breathing, the basis of my vocabulary, the reason for the warmth and the love i attach to everywhere i’ve lived and eaten and walked. who will stay with me when we leave this place? if i hold on too tight, i know that i’ll crush it. and it’s a beautiful thing to watch who comes and goes. to be surrounded by so much talent, so much light and good fortune: i want to soak it all up before the curtains fall and the waves crash over my head.