Today the temperature climbed to 70. It's cooler now, but every so often the wind pushes into the room, and there's just something about the way it smells. Melancholy, somehow. It's the kind of air that reminds me of soft, mild nights at the end of the school year in college, when I both wanted classes to be over and desperately didn't want to have to leave my friends for the summer. Bittersweet air, air that's full of things ending.
I don't think you need much psychology to guess that this is probably me reacting to the upheavals that are coming my way. Being with Sean will be awesome, yes, but it also means leaving all my friends, and the life I've made for myself here. It also means, more frighteningly, that the 'easy' part of my graduate career is over. No more fellowship to support me, no more classes to structure my life around, just me, out there trying to make some kind of mark in the academic world--still with no idea of how I'm going to be doing that, naturally. There's so much uncertainty ahead, which makes the world around me right now seem so comfortable, so warm. I can't even get excited about Venice, really; if my life were a book, Venice would be in the next chapter--or maybe in the interlude between chapters. I'm scared of what's going to come when I turn the page.
This melancholy night air isn't helping, naturally. Right now, what wouldn't I give to be back in one of those nights in college, when everything was still potential and possibility? A part of me thinks, how melodramatic! After all, it's not like my life is hopeless; it's just that there was such a sense of security back then, before we'd all made our choices and started on our paths. And there were friends around, always friends. Again, not that I'm without friends now. It's just bittersweet to look back on the time when I could turn over in my bed and talk to Carla in the dark, instead of sending her facebook messages that she won't return until the sun comes up where she is.
Maybe I should mention that when I have these thoughts about returning to Fairfield, I never imagine going back to the townhouses. It's always to our sophomore year dorm in Loyola, the last year we were all together, me and Carla, with Meredith and Popham at the end of the hall and the guys downstairs, trekking in herds to the dining hall in the evening and endlessly debating whether a group our size fit bitter at a round table or a rectangular one. I was always for the rectangles; more leg room, even if you couldn't talk to everyone as easily.
It's true what they say, of course; you can never go home again. Maybe that's a part of it, too, the idea of home. I haven't had a home, in the parental sense, for five years. Home has quite literally been where I've lain my head. In college (3/4 of it anyway) I still had that base to return to, with its own collection of bittersweet reunions with and partings from friends, and my mom, the center of gravity. I miss her, too, it goes without saying. Even though I doubt she'd have much in the way of advice to offer my on my life at this point, it would be enough just to hear her voice.
Here comes that sad wind blowing in again! Time to resist. Time to go look at funny cat pictures.