Before every summer break I’m always secretly worried that I’ll go home and never come back. I worry that my entire college experience was all something I imagined, and that all the small, wonderful moments that I created and experienced here might become something like one of those dreams that you can never fully remember after you wake up.
From the time of my birth until August 2010, U.Va. was not a tangible, physical place to me. It was, rather, a conglomeration of stories my parents had told me, of memories laughingly reminisced about over beers on our back porch or wistfully recalled on long car rides to the beach. It was a series of conjured images based on tales I’d heard a million times over — my 18-year-old father driving with his fraternity brothers down to Nashville in his beat-up car, my mother mixing up orders and spilling drinks as a waitress at the Virginian, and the first time they ever met over an awkward lunch of chicken and green beans in Newcomb Dining Hall.
I came to U.Va. ready and eager to seize moments like these for my own, to embark on a series of significant happenings that would form themselves into the stepping stones that propelled me into the grown person I figured I was meant to be. But, like so many things we expect to happen, this did not.
I started school with a desire to embark on a Kerouac-style life — sucking the importance out of every moment and making it all really count. I wanted to absolutely revel in every single thing as it happened to me and to be able to appreciate each minute detail of my life at U.Va. before it slipped by and became just another memory that I would someday tell a daughter of my own. Sometimes I find myself walking down the Lawn some early morning on my way to class and stopping to try and soak it all in, attempting to make myself realize that this moment will eventually be something I can only distantly look back on. I feel overwhelmed by the anxious need to absorb its entire significance right now before it’s too late, before it’s gone. But I never can, it’s too overwhelming, and I continue on my way to class, getting caught up once again in the unimportant worries of my everyday life.
Yet it’s the mundane aspects, these dumb, typical factors of my existence that I think are the foundations of the U.Va. I have built for myself and will one day reflect upon. It won’t be some majestic image of myself strolling past the Rotunda with the sun rising behind me that I will recall but the simple moments, the ones that at the time seem insignificant yet silently remain with me.
My U.Va. will be me tucked into the stacks of Alderman, staring at my computer and attempting to write yet another paper late into the night. It will be me taking that familiar stone path that winds its way to my sorority’s front porch. It will be the sound of the chapel bells drifting in through my bedroom window, reminding me that another hour has gone by. And yes, because life is unexpected and complex and strange and terrifying, it will also be the moments I don’t want to remember but will: me crying alone behind the psychology building the first week of school, the painful realization of a friendship lost, the entire bittersweet mess of growing up and becoming my own person. These memories will all be there, too, drifting somewhere amidst this jumble of life I have created for myself.
I think the most important aspect of my time here has been simply learning to just exist in it, to not overthink what I am doing or worry that I am wasting these precious moments of my college experience that are all the time drifting by. Instead of attempting to create some college tale for myself centered on the memories I feel as if I should be making, I have simply lived, taking each instant as it comes. This second — this very space of time — this is your University experience. These moments between the clicking of my computer keys and the steady rhythm of my sleepy breathing — right now, right now, right now — this is my time here at U.Va. This is my life.
Mimi’s column runs biweekly Mondays. She can be reached at m.montgomery@cavalierdaily.com.
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