I have a fairly good idea about the concrete elements of my future, as we imagine it now. There is the fragility of life, the giant variables that are no more likely to strike me today than they were months ago in a period of at least short-term certainty. Pausing to understand all of the factors in my decisions, all of the possibilities and costs allows for some reflection on how things are that gets lost in times of certainty and routine.
This was going to be a travel blog. I've traveled many miles in the past few years. St. Paul to Bloomington, Indiana. A new dorm on a new street. Back to St. Paul, to Italy, Wisconsin. Turn the car around and two tears while my Dad finishes a work call and I apprehensively steer Southeast for a second year at Indiana. Devastating betrayal, a second new dorm in two years, in a different building. That move by myself, enough was enough with the family ordeals. And then, in my plans, a YEAR abroad. A travel blog for the family at home, to be vaguely personal, but mostly filled with postcard sized chunks of information. Morsels of my journey that would spark interest in others, and nostalgia in myself in later days.
So much for that. All that moving around, packing, unpacking, settling, adjusting, crying, missing, learning, adapting. I am done for a while. Right now I am in the truest home I have ever known. A big old house (built by a B-list architect in 1888) 10 minutes from the house my parents walked into when they brought me home from the hospital. This is the place where I know the streets by landmarks more than names, where I feel safest going 50mph on a windy river road. I vigorously defy the rule of the law when I drive by the Mississippi, claiming those views, curves, thrills; that land as my own. I live here and it is mine as much as any law enforcement officer's. These are the streets on which I am not afraid to speed, not afraid to run a stop light every now and then. This is familiarity in a way that isn't at all boring yet, but still shocking. To know a place so well- to have streets I love, and streets that hurt to drive down.
I just told pretty much my best friend in Bloomington that I won't be a million miles away for his entire senior year. We spent a lot of time denying that fact, a lot of time acknowledging it by refusing to acknowledge it. Weighing the unease of the year that lies ahead- adjusting, broadening, shifting, re-focusing, with the complete comfort I feel about where I stand today makes sense.
It makes sense that I would want to move into one apartment and stay there for the next two years and finish college on the same campus I started it. Indiana University was not a college choice I made in April of my senior year. It's a choice I make every semester when I inevitably begin a transfer application, often blowing $60 on the possibility of greater happiness, only to settle with the less-dangerous known entity. I foresee the same gambles in the next two years. IU was never a perfect fit, I've told everyone as an explanation for why, halfway in, the transfer bug has bit again. (Let's not even get into bug bites. I have about 15 and they're not mosquito bites, I don't know what they are. Oh, the unknown is so scary!!) It truly was never a perfect fit, and I will remember these years as trying ones- like a tough hike on a too-cold November fall day. The scenery is lovely, and the people you are with are happy, but you would rather be reading a book next to a fire- you know there is better out there, other choices, but I'm out on my trail now. It has been in some respects easier and in many much more difficult than I had once hoped and expected. Always, the alone-ness (which after these years, has become a distinct feeling from, yet always bordering on loneliness) threatens to send its deep chill through whatever warmth I build. I think about turning back, hiking the trail downhill and eventually nestling myself in the warmth of twin cities on a river. But I've invested a lot- and I can leave at this halfway juncture whatever I don't want to carry with me anymore. And I plan on leaving a lot.
In order to go back to IU happily
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