15 Years In the Blink of An Eye

They say to trust in the magic of new beginnings. In the summer of 1997, I had already decided to go to school out-of-state. Many of my high school classmates were going to Ohio State, and Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio and Ohio University. Others scattered across the country, but no one else from my high school headed to the Pennsylvania state school that I had chosen.

At Freshmen Orientation, I met another girl who, in the sea of strangers, seemed like a familiar. Since otherwise the roommate assignment process was a random jumble lottery, we decided that we would trust in fate, and each other’s apparent normalcy, and room together (for the next four years, as it turned out).

For those next four years, that little town in Pennsylvania, too far away to be suburban Pittsburgh, and confusingly dual-state named – Indiana, Pennsylvania, hometown of Jimmy Stewart (you literally have to say it altogether) – was home. Somehow, even in those first days as we loaded suitcases and plastic egg crates into the service elevator and set up our first home away from home, our college family was already drawing inward toward a cohesive core. Through the magic of new beginnings, instead of being strangers in a strange land, we found new orbits, and we were kept steady by the gravitational pull of us, on us.

Princess Diana died the first week of college. I can remember watching the news on the TV/VCR combo in our dorm room. My 18^th birthday fell a week or two after college started, and my new circle delivered a pizza, with candles. I can still picture the matching bedspreads (but reversible so we had options) that my roommate and I picked out. We put up a wallpaper border, because why not; this was home now, after all (though it frequently fell, almost as if putty wasn’t the glue we assumed it would be). We were perhaps the last college generation of calling cards and land lines, of DOS login screens and 24mm film developing. All of that seems so long ago, a little fuzzy around the edges… and yet the friendships, the people, are current and vibrant and real, still in my orbit, still gravitationally imperative to my sense of balance.

To say that college friends are family is, I think, in no way hyperbolic. For years, you are living together, eating together, studying together, procrastinating together. I can very literally say that those friendships were a testament to blood, sweat and tears. Not a lot of blood, thankfully, but some (I tend to go woozy at the sight of blood, so it’s just as well it was infrequent). But they did include an Even Stephen policy on exercise, and there were definitely some tears, a lot of laughter. In the same way that our immediate family experiences are a mix of the day-to-day and the peaks and valleys, so are our college days. I was incomparably lucky.

In the last 15 years, I’ve seen some of those friends quite a bit. Some a handful of times, and some just once or twice. Some, I had not seen since graduation, even though we’d kept in touch, celebrated new jobs and new children, mourned losses and disappointments. After years of talking about a reunion in broad terms, two of those friends set a date and said, This is it. This is the day and we will see you all there.

RSVP’ing should have been easy. It should have been an automatic, come hell or high water enthusiastic YES. Yes to the people, absolutely. These are the sisters of my heart. But years that are so highly charged with every possible emotion come with baggage as well. Not every moment is a glowing golden memory. They shouldn’t be. What sort of shallow person would such a one-dimensional life create. But knowingly walking back into those less golden memories in some ways felt like risking a confrontation with ghosts not entirely laid to rest. What shades and of who would I see, faded by years, and yet in sharp relief against that thick wall built and then intentionally wiped clean?

But my friends know better than me, and thank goodness. Don’t be ridiculous, they said, in varying ways. Of course you’re going. Which found me on a plane headed to Pittsburgh. Well, not right away. My flight was first delayed by 5 hours in the airport, and then by another 2 on the tarmac, and then, finally in flight, we lost power to an engine and had to do an emergency landing in Kansas City. “Just when we thought this flight couldn’t get worse, folks,” said the pilot. “We’re going to be landing soon and safely, but not in Pittsburgh.” It was late. I was already supposed to be in the heart of my circle. The only food option was a bagel shop, and I don’t eat wheat. After another couple of hours and some false hope, the flight was canceled and somewhat questionable lodging provided near the airport. I called my college roommate.

“I don’t know,” I said, tired and discouraged, with a headache I’d had since the tarmac delay now in full force, and still hours away from Pittsburgh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course, you’re still coming.” I took a taxi to the hotel, unwilling to wait for the tiny shuttle bus to clear an airplane full of frazzled travelers from the curb at Kansas City International. I’m fanatical about hotel rooms. I check for bed bugs and toilet ring and smell the towels for bleach. It’s a problem, I know, but not something I can control. Except that night, I just didn’t care. I kicked off my shoes and walked right across the hotel carpet. I pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. It felt like I wasn’t 18 anymore.

The next afternoon, finally making it to Pittsburgh, my roommate’s husband picked me up from the airport to take me the next 2 hours to campus where everyone else had already gathered. We know each other mostly through photos. We’re Facebook friends and I have his number in my phone, but I flipped through those photos quickly to make sure I remembered exactly who I was looking for. It could have been awkward, I suppose, that two hour drive. Except that he’s basically family, even if we’ve only met once before. At one point he said of his wife, “Well, you’ve known her longer than I have.” And the truth of that is somehow the realest, most important part of this spontaneous reunion. I have known these friends more than half my life, and that percentage will only continue to grow as we get older. These are the people who were there at the new beginnings; collectively, we are our secret keepers and broken heart tenders. A mirror to our laughter.

It’s hard to explain what it felt like when we were all finally together again. Because what it felt was… normal. It felt like we might all get together every weekend, except there was probably more hugging. It felt like we’d always felt together. An unbroken orbit. There were children and there were spouses, but they were already woven into the whole because that’s the way family works.

People change less than places. We went back to campus and they are in the midst of renovating, which is a bit tragic. It was this great old red brick and ivy architecture centered by an old and lovely Oak Grove with wagon wheel paths. It was the sort of place that was calming and peaceful because it felt like it had been just that way for generations, and would be the same for generations more. You were walking the same paths as women who had worn long skirts and puffed sleeves at the turn of the century and men in newsboy and Gatsby hats a couple of decades later.

And now they’re knocking it down and replacing it with that stereotypical brick and tan clapboard townhouse look that doesn’t have nearly the same sense of tradition. As we walked, one of my friends, our group’s patient conscience and subtle jester, said, “They did it wrong.” And he’s right. It hurts to see in some ways. If we go back again and our old dorm room isn’t there for us to marvel over its tiny dimensions, or to smell the familiar, even after 15 years, smell of stairway tread rubber and still air… will it still feel like going home again? If Frida Kahlo isn’t looking over our shoulder in the picture bathroom, or Klimt paintings hanging in the lobby, will just the geographical coordinates have the same significance? I lost my childhood home to a front end loader in a heartbreaking end to an era, and I have to say that now my childhood town is a place I once lived, but it has lost its pull. There are people I love there, but the place is gone. Hiraeth is the nostalgia, the grief for lost places of our past. In some ways, in going back, in seeing what has already begun, the hiraeth for our college haunts seems inevitable, even as I celebrate the friendships that will never crumble like the concrete steps that have seen so many student footsteps come and go. It felt like a celebration of the people, but a letting go of the place. A continuity juxtaposed by a conclusion.

I won’t say that we aren’t older. Because we are, though in my eyes, we looked the same. But I think we are also more comfortable in our own skin now, which makes us perhaps just more substantive versions of who were then. We’re not the same, but we’re not so different.

We’ve known each other longer than we’ve known our children and our partners and we’re still steady in our original orbit, our gravitational pull on each other the most important and unchanging magic of our long ago new beginning.