It is the type of morning that howls. Dark still, but so forceful.
When I was in college, I lived on the 8th floor of a high rise building. The wind up there was something stunning; I worried about blowing over, though our walls were made of cinderblock.
That fall, I couldn’t eat enough oranges. I craved them constantly, sometimes eating several a day. I’d sit in my room, listening to the wind, gearing my wits up about me so that I could make the walk to the next quad for those oranges. I learned to peel them quickly, separating the pith from the fruit, sometimes in one whole piece.
I did not love college. I knew pretty quickly that I would have done better if I’d gone somewhere smaller, somewhere farther away. There were lots of reasons why that didn’t happen.
Sometimes the dining hall had Lobster Night, which justifiably brought out student protesters. They’d stand outside with their signs while inside, some inevitable number of college boys used their lobsters as weapons, threatening to chomp other people with them. I never ate the lobsters, over there already experimenting with vegetarianism, but I also didn’t stand outside with a sign.
In my first semester, I took a class called the Physics of Music. My advisor – a graduate student I met with once as I signed up for classes, who didn’t know me and who didn’t want to know me – said that it was a good way to get a science class out of the way, especially if you weren’t a science kind of person. I was not a science kind of person, that was true, but I was still someone who might have liked a class where I learned something interesting or useful. The class was at 8:00, three days a week, and I showed up in my pajama pants to sit in a lecture hall with hundreds of tired freshmen. It was an awful class.
Freshman year, I spent a lot of time feeling wrong. I hung out with people, but I just really had one close friend with whom I felt like I could be myself. We’d sit in the hallway of our dorm playing cards. We’d sit there and joke about being apathetic, about fucking up, and then we jokingly gave ourselves those nicknames: she was Apathetic, I was Fuck-Up. No, of course we weren’t those things. We volunteered together for feminist causes, we talked about things that mattered. Up on that 8th floor of that big building, though, we did our best to figure ourselves out, as everyone was doing.
I carry all of that with me, as we carry everything with us, whether we remember it or not. The oranges, the wind, the card games in the hall. The fact of a class, if not the content. The way it was, to be young and going through the motions, hoping to find something I was seeking.
Here, now, I hear the rain dripping onto the front porch. The wind gusts; a trash can rubberly clatters to the ground. Soon enough, in my raincoat, in my boots, I’ll leash up the tiny dogs and do my best to keep them from blowing away.
The Wandering Introvert 