 |
| An 8th floor classroom where I take Greek lessons |
For some reason, fourteen weeks doesn't seem like a long time to me, although I've started to forget what it was like living anywhere else but here, in New York City. I've become completely immune to the continual street-noise symphony outside my window; I spend at least fifteen minutes every day in the Duane Reade on Broadway (one of them, that is); my fascination with being able to see right into the apartment level with my room on the other side of the street has totally worn off.
I could give you detailed directions to Molly's Cupcakes on Bleecker, or to Think Coffee on Mercer, or to pretty much any Gristedes in the Village. Sometimes I look up and am slightly weirded-out to realize I no longer marvel at twenty-story buildings. I walk on those grate-y things on the sidewalk; I wait to cross the street much past the curb; I've mastered my best scowl to give impatient drivers trying to turn right when pedestrians have the right of way.
I don't quite feel like I've earned my New Yorker status yet, but maybe I'm in some kind of grey area between Belonging to the Place I Grew Up and Belonging to the Place I Now Live. Quite honestly, sometimes this grey area is a little lonely, an odd sentiment considering the 1.6 million people who call Manhattan their home, but a common one, considering the 1.6 million people who call Manhattan their home. It's a city I'm still trying to understand, but it no longer lives solely on the TV screen or in the movies, in other people's stories, in my fantasies. This is my every-day.
Two weeks from today, I will be packing up a fraction of my belongings from the little corner of my room, studying for my last final exam, and thrilled, no doubt, to be almost done with my first semester of university. It's not only the month long break which will be exciting (although make no mistake, five weeks? Without any school work? Friggin' amazing), but also knowing that when I return to school in January for the new semester, I will be in a place so entirely different, and better, than the one I was in when I arrived fourteen weeks ago.
Part of that will be knowing my surroundings better, but mostly it will lie in the fact that I'm so much better at taking care of myself now than I was four months ago. I make grocery-shopping lists. I can clean the entire bathroom in thirty minutes. I have a medicine drawer. I dust.
Living away from your family never really sucks less, but you get used it after a while, and you get better at finding ways to communicate and staying involved in each other's lives. Like playing Taboo over FaceTime, or live-texting commentary while watching a movie, or Snapchatting grotesque faces while your roommates aren't looking (and sometimes even when they are because dorm rooms aren't that big and you've got to try a couple times before you achieve optimal ugliness).
Every once in a while homesickness, not really for your physical home but more for the way you feel when you're there, can hit you in the gut and leave you feeling tether-less and lost and all you want to do is close your eyes and wish away the whole thing-- college, moving away, growing up-- but then it passes and you feel like a total badass because you're a "college kid" who "answers to no-one" and you can "eat Chick-fil-a every other day" without your "mom" "judging you."
Socially, save for the first few weeks of the mania-induced Freshman frenzy, my first semester has been quieter than I originally anticipated. With a totally clean slate, making friends can actually be pretty difficult, especially when you only share one class with so many people for an hour and a half, most of which you spend in silence and while furiously scribbling notes, and then you all go your separate ways because for the first time in your life your time is your own and if you choose to go back to your room in between classes just to read or listen to Christmas music with your microwaved bowl of ramen, then you actually can.
Making friends in college is certainly a more organic process, one that requires of you a little more effort and endurance. However, the effort feels deliberate rather than obligatory, a nice change from high school. For me, it being slow-going makes sense. I used to be in a pool of 2,000 kids, most of whom had passed me in the hallway thousands of times over the course of seven years. Now, I'm dealing with a pool of almost 60,000. Fifteen weeks just isn't going to cut it.
I'm excited for the next fifteen though. I'm excited to meet more people and become closer with the ones I already have. I'm excited to see more of New York and learn more about my new home. I'm excited for the warm weather to return, but I'm told not to hold my breath.
Hope everyone has a lovely holiday season. I'll see y'all in 2016.
-Danielle
No comments:
Post a Comment