A Southward Tide

The first days of college were a period of great possibility. We had finally arrived, survivors of parental dysfunction, high school theatrics and the ragged adolescent investigation into selfhood and drugs.

From across the country we had travelled, all different colors and sizes and textures, drawn together like pilgrims at the pinnacle of a spiritual quest. The University of Chicago. Within the fifteen block perimeter of this cathedral campus were stone dormitories, eating halls suffused with that particular Aramark smell, a classics building and humanities library, a radio station with a beaten up couch, an underground maze of corridors and basements – clandestine repositories of erudition – an old lap pool with its hexagonal tiles, muddy lawns under blooming canopies, snow drifts and icicles in winter, mosquitos and humidity. We congregated at the overheated student center, in beer bars with black painted floors, and on the back stairs of student apartments with their crusted windows and clanging radiators.

We trudged through the four years, forming friendships unlike any others we had known before or would know after. As teenagers, arriving fresh from the nest, we imprinted to each other like baby birds. Except we did not know that then. We could not possibly realize how unique college would be in the course of our lives.

And four years seemed like forever. But then it all came to an end, tapering off ever so slowly. Senior year. Countdown to commencement. Some of us were voracious planners – interviewing, assessing, paving small pathways toward a larger goal. Some of us just waited, a light anxiety fluttering in our hearts. We were beginning to disconnect from each other, to draw inwards. Some of us left our significant others and bade farewell to the minor friendships.

First we graduated. Then came September 11 and afterwards, our twenties continued for one long decade. We struggled through the process of maturation as we disassembled the staggering passions of youth.

Some of us walked this pain together, moving to New York or San Francisco or London or China, choosing similar careers and exploring fresh avenues together, reformulating and reinventing our friendships, strengthening them with each passing of the year.

Some of us died young.

Some of us drifted apart never to rekindle our former bond. We had each mapped a different route to cope with this thing called life, which in no way resembled what we thought life would be when we were eighteen years old and shimmering with the thrill of beginnings.

Maybe for some, our twenties buckled to cynicism as we realized that reality could not be manipulated like a teenager who constructs his own universe. But certainly and hopefully, some of us realized that within this staunchness of life was a different kind of joy. Now some of us marry. Now we have little children too. Some of us settle down to career. Some divorce. We stand at the dawn of another great era, another realm of simmering promise, albeit different in kind.