This Is Goodbye My Friends

I have this white board in my old bedroom in my parent’s house that is still filled with a list of things to bring to college, which I hastily scribbled out five months ago. When I returned home sick, the list couldn’t help but draw my eye, with it’s bright blue scrawl now acting as the centerpiece in my empty room.

Rock Climbing Gear

Yoga Stuff

Bedding…

It is amazing that this messy little list is the best reminder of what I thought my first semester in college would be like. I was finally escaping god-forsaken Oklahoma to live at the base of the Rockies, in a town where yoga studios littered every corner and I could eat granola and yogurt every day. In the end, I did a pretty good job guessing what I would need for life in my teeny-tiny dorm. But I could never have predicted how my first semester would turn out. Though I put my climbing gear at the top of the list, I only made the time to go climbing once, and my yoga practice took a long vacation when my illness moved in. I did make ample use of my bedding (you become good friends with your sheets when you are bedridden for two months), and ate my weight in granola and yogurt.

Now I am moving back home to recover from my illness with my family’s support, and I have been reflecting on my first semester of college. I imagined that I would climb out of bed in the morning, dash off to yoga for an hour or two, maybe go to a few classes, then be off to the Flat Irons for an evening climb. Clearly, life had different plans.

I wish that I could offer up an insight from my experience, summarize in five hundred words or less the greater truth I have learned. But, I can’t. Like my situation right now, my emotions and insights are complicated. I enjoyed my time at CU; I will miss the school and my friends. But I know logically that returning to the University of Oklahoma is the best thing for me right now. I have no clear idea what I want to do with my life, or even what continent I will be on in six months. I do not even know where I will be living in January.

All I can really do is try to avoid poking my tender and confused emotions too much, and let them sort themselves out. I can bake Christmas cookies, enroll in classes, and try to find some way to build a new life in Oklahoma. Looking back, it was the times when I was goofing off with my friends, or doing what I loved that I was happiest. So, maybe it doesn’t matter what state I am in (and maybe Oklahoma is not as god-forsaken as I once thought), but what I do with the time that is given me.

For now, the only insight I can offer you in my last post is this; life never fits in a plan. There is rarely a clear answer, and it is nearly impossible to pick a course and stick with it till the end. But despite my terribly confused life and my equally confused emotions, the monkey wrenches I have been thrown have made my life richer than I could have imagined when I first wrote my list on that abandoned white board.

Living In A Closet-Sized Room With A Complete Stranger....

I never thought I would enjoy living in a teeny-tiny, off-white dorm room with a complete stranger, and I will admit, there were parts of living in the dorms that I absolutely loathed. The food is terrible (and bad for me to boot), the gentlemen who live above my room have terrible taste in techno music, and I cannot have a dog. But, overall, I am glad that I chose to live in the dorms.

As the woman in the study abroad talk commented, “Living in a closet-sized room with a total stranger, no kitchen, and a public bathroom for a year is a uniquely American thing.” Most of my parent’s friends, who have long left their college days behind, simply shake their head and grimace when I describe the manner in which I live. It is amazing how the look they give me perfectly matches the looks I get while discussing my miserable, two month long mystery illness—as if they were equivalent levels of suffering. But honestly, though I play up the sympathy card with colorful descriptions of strange, gelatinous substances in the sinks and comparisons to high-class refugee camps, it is not that miserable.

I have never been in a place that is so silly and carefree. We prance around and two o’clock in the morning, stealing people’s chairs and hiding them in the public showers. Doors are never locked here, and I constantly have girls walking into my room heralding the usual opening phrase, “I have the best gossip.” We watch the gag reel of “Star Trek 2009” seven times in a row, and my roommate reads me bedtime stories about all the chemicals in refined sugar that will make me grow a third arm twenty years down the road.

I spent all of last night camped out in on my friend’s obnoxiously pink shag rug (honestly, it looks like Barbie vomited on it) playing “Star Wars Trivial Pursuit” with my roommate and friend Chelsea (whose depths of nerd knowledge never fail to amaze me). We pig out on Cosmos Pizza and chocolate-chip cookies, paint our toenails, and mercilessly judge the hot (or not hot) men on TV. Nights like those are the ones that have made my college experience worthwhile.

I love that company is only a few steps and a knock on the door away. I have gotten to know the girls in my hall like I have never known anyone before. How many people get to see that Miss Southern Bell Emma is a trekkie? Or that Caroline (a biology major) has always dreamed of being a D.J.? Or that Diana has a completely irrational fear of fish? But, these are the silly things you learn about someone’s private life that you cannot learn without hanging out on a Tuesday night, and a Wednesday night, and Thursday, and well you catch my drift.

My roommate, Diana, has been the most worthwhile thing about the dorms. She is a quirky, considerate, bundle of chaos. She is always up for anything, she is a modern twist on her old-school hippie mother and father, she has these disturbingly bohemian moments, she shops for shoes in Prague, and she one of the most down-to-earth people I know.

As shocked as I am to hear myself saying this, living in a closet sized room with a complete stranger was the best thing I have done for myself in college. I don’t know what I would do without Diana’s wise/bohemian/amazingly down to earth/off the wall advice. The funny thing is that we are not best friends (we would probably slit each other’s throats if we saw much more of each other); she is more like my favorite cousin. She knows all of the minute details of my existence: from my worst hair days, to my strange compulsion to make my bed (which only developed after I moved out of my parent’s house—sorry mom), to my unhealthy obsession with “The West Wing.” It is amazing to have someone who knows me that well to seek opinions from, and who gives those opinions without an opinion about who I should become.

I think I will come to miss our daily floor-wide exercise-video workouts (ordered off an infomercial—as the best kinds always are), our lazy nights spent flipping through Cosmo and discussing the latest scandals, and most of all, the companionship that is inevitably born from living in such close proximity to one another. But let’s be honest, despite all the good, I won’t be signing up for another year in the dorms.