It was a yellow night on Home Avenue. The trees’ yellow leaves trapped the yellow street light and this, combined with a mist, cast a yellow glaze over everything. The ground was covered with leaves, so that almost everywhere you stepped it was soft, like a rug. Outside felt like a room. People were milling about the street in packs: laughing, talking, flirting, arguing, and the later it got, the more we slipped into the grip a collective stupor, and the more we made up for it in booming voices. We were dressed up as kids dress up at Wesleyan on a Saturday night. There were hats and boots, scarves, dresses and the occasional three piece suit. At Wesleyan we enjoy putting ourselves together before sending ourselves away.
I cannot just be at Wesleyan anymore. I have to be here as someone’s guest. Tonight I was the guest, of a guest, of a guest, at 88 Home, where I’d woken up that morning on a mattress shared by three people, also alumni. To get to the bathroom in middle of the night, I’d had to walk down some pitch black stairs and through the room of a boy I didn’t know. The boy’s name was “Saturday Night” and he had a cross country race the next morning and needed to get a good night’s sleep. The kids I was sharing the mattress with kept on saying “I’m so worried about Saturday Night!” “Me too!” I echoed, thinking we were talking about the upcoming event, not the boy.
I was worried about Saturday night because I realized it might be my last night at Wesleyan. And how could this be.
When I left Wesleyan in May I felt too numb to feel much of anything. Before pulling out onto the Merritt Parkway I did something kind of strange and dishonest. I bought a poster and wrote the words “Just Dumped” in big, bold, letters, and then I taped in on my back window. Get it, instead of “Just Married,” “Just Dumped”? I hadn’t just been dumped in the traditional sense of the word, but in many ways I felt like I had. Dumped by college, dumped by youth, dumped back at my family’s house in Westchester with no job, no friends, no clue of what to do.
A few weeks after returning to my family’s house in Westchester, I moved into a studio apartment a block away from the building I’d grown up in, in Manhattan. “It will be comforting to return to my old neighborhood,” I told myself. I was wrong. It was a cold neighborhood on the Upper Eastside and if people recognized me from when I was younger, they didn’t let on. Also, when I looked from the window of my new apartment, there was my childhood bedroom, looming over me. I had the same view but reversed. It felt like looking through a mirror the wrong way. After several weeks I got rid of the apartment, got in my car, and started driving west.
At each of the parties I went to on Saturday night I wandered. I lapped the courtyard or the kitchen several times looking for someone or something, but not quite sure who or what. Then I remembered this was a feeling I often had at Wesleyan, this looking for something, this chronic case of wanderlust. Looking for the better party, the crush, the friends, the keg, someone with an extra cigarette. As much as I loved this place, I always had this feeling that something was missing or lacking, or something better was right around the corner, and that I better keep on moving in order to find it.
My drive out west ended up being a two-month solo tour of the country. I drove through twenty-six states looking for things to do. Each time I’d arrive somewhere, I’d be struck with hope that maybe this would be where I’d want to stay and build a new life from scratch. But then it only took a little while for me to want to get back in my car and go. And then it took an even shorter amount of time for me to do this.
My last stop was the set of a low-budget psycho thriller in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Here I only lasted five days. My plan was to leave Pennsylvania and drive to Boston, but when I mapquested Malvern to Boston, the directions sent me smack through Wesleyan’s campus. “Is this Mapquest’s sense of humor?” I thought. And so I ended up back at Wesleyan, which felt a bit like visiting an ex you are trying to break up with. You want to notice all the things that always irked you, but instead you are reminded of what made you fall in love. You may have processed the separation intellectually, but emotionally you are not there yet. You see a home in a face, in a yellow night, and a part of you screams home, home, home, home, this is home, I want to be home.
“I swear I’m going to pop that Winnie the fucking Pooh,” a voice shouted as I was walking to Home from the last party, on the last night, of my last weekend at Wesleyan. I looked up and noticed a giant, inflatable, lit up Winnie the Pooh perched on top of a doorframe on Lawn Ave. It was high up and to pop him you’d need a spear or a shot gun. Suddenly I remembered a Joan Didion quote that I recited to myself a lot last spring: “It is entirely possible to stay too long at the fair.” Then there was a loud boom and a rubber trash bin tumbled down the hill.
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