A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: College

December 13, 2013

Friendships of a Different Kind

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.

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October 31, 2013

A Spectral Rooster

My second year at the University of Chicago, I moved into an apartment owned by my roommate’s father, a professor emeritus of Arabic Literature. Years before they had purchased the flat on the cheap as the previous tenant had been murdered there by her husband. She had been a sculptor; traces of clay were still visible between the floorboards.

It was summer in Chicago. A few days before the other roommates arrived, my boyfriend helped me move into the grimy walk-up that had been uninhabited for a decade. I had just purchased a single size futon, presumably to torture him. He squeezed next to me on the dusty floor of a bedroom with no air conditioning. That first night, we somehow convinced ourselves  that a human size rooster would soon be seen walking by, its sharpened spurs clicking on the floor, pausing at our bedroom door long enough to turn a feathered head and merciless gaze towards us. Terrified, we ran off to sleep at his mother’s house. So visual was this fear that even today I hold a crystalline image of that rooster in the mind’s eye.

A few years after college, I traveled to New Zealand with the same poor man. We were camping outside of Queenstown and walked to town one evening to watch The Ring. Later back at camp, I bawled in fear. The images on the screen, the images in my head, were no different than reality.  I would not have been surprised to see that evil child’s ratty wig of long black hair and bent arm snaking though the zipper of our tent

From childhood I have carried through the concept that if a negative thought alights on my mind but for a second, that thing, awful, tragic, or terrifying, will be willed into being. It began with the ‘Bloody Mary’s’ chanted in front of third grade bathroom mirrors and continued with ghost stories, roosters and later the sense of impending doom that surrounded almost all of my romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I have not maintained the logically opposite belief: that wonderful and enchanted things will happen to me if I dare to think about them. And neither have I done much to dispel the negatives. The notion of creating phantoms, tragedies and car accidents with the mind is an intoxicating delusion. But today is Halloween, so you’ll forgive me if I choose to resurrect nostalgic ghosts – spectral roosters walking bandy-legged through the past.

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