Goodbye is all we have
He didn’t even share his name until the last moment. “I’m Zachary, by the way. Have a nice rest of your trip!” Happy smile, subtle wave and a pivot-turn in the opposite direction — gone, and probably for good.
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He didn’t even share his name until the last moment. “I’m Zachary, by the way. Have a nice rest of your trip!” Happy smile, subtle wave and a pivot-turn in the opposite direction — gone, and probably for good.
On a two-day, 1600-mile jaunt up and down the southern east coast this past weekend, I passed the exit on Interstate 95 for a small Georgia island where I always spend holidays visiting family. While speeding by at 80 miles per hour, I could make out in the distance the distinctive bridge connecting the island to the mainland. I turned to my aunt, my driving companion at the time, and shared with her my sudden realization: “I’ve gone back to St. Simons more times in the past semester than I’ve gone home.”Recently in the library, I ran into an acquaintance and mentioned I was headed home to DC for the weekend. She was confused. “I thought you were from Georgia! Must be because you have so much family there,” she remembered. “You might as well be from there; you know the place like the back of your hand. I can see you really being from there instead.”This conversation came back to me as I was looking over those southern coastal marshes and towards the island where I had spent so much of my childhood. If anyone were to ask, I would undoubtedly say I was from outside of DC, where I was born and grew up. But if I actually ask myself where I did most of my growing up, most of my learning, the answer is in no way the same. All of this I did while in Georgia: by the marsh and by the beach, at friend-filled dinners and family reunions, while digging holes in the sand and fishing off the pier, while eating sweet potato fries and drinking sweet tea, while driving down the island’s only road with the windows down and radio up, singing, storytelling, guitar-strumming, laughing. I spent most of middle school and high school wishing my family would pack their bags and move away to the salty-aired island I knew and loved. While there was plenty of talk among my immediate family of doing just this, it never happened. As a consequence, I was grumblingly stuck in my so-called “hometown,” some lackluster, humdrum suburb where I felt both disconnected and uncomfortable. I made the most of it, however; I had great friends, great experiences and an overall enjoyable time. But I still couldn’t wait to get out, which I realize now is a relatively common notion among American youth. College, it seemed, was my solution. I could escape! I could explore! I could find a place where, much like on small island off the coast of Georgia, I felt content but never listless, busy but never exhausted. And then I enrolled at U.Va. — admittedly, not my first choice, if only due to its proximity to the place where I spent the first twenty years of my life.The irony in this ended up being twofold. Upon arrival, I fell in love with this school more than I ever could have imagined. But I fell in love with it despite quickly coming to the realization that Charlottesville, wonderful though it may be, was still not my “home.” Nor was my hometown in Northern Virginia, I came to realize, despite having told myself otherwise for the past twenty years. St. Simons — that little island off the Georgia coast — was my home.In college, people seem to ask you quite often where you’re from. I have just begun to realize one actually has a choice in how they answer this question. Sure, maybe it’s silly or obnoxious to answer relatively abstractly — “Do you mean where I actually did my growing?” — but at the same time, isn’t this what someone is really wondering when they ask you where you’re from? Who cares if someone is from Boston or Los Angeles or London or Santa Fe or wherever, unless being from that place actually reveals something previously unknown about the person in question? Most people can’t help but be formed and changed by the various places they come into contact with throughout their life. In a sense, we all have multiple hometowns — the places where you were born, went to school, visited your friends, drove through to get to your grandmother’s house; the list goes on and on. “Where you’re from” encompasses so much more than the name of some arbitrary and unchosen town; it encompasses where you came from and what you are. It’s not a simple question — why settle for a simple answer?
Over fall break, a group of friends and I road-tripped to southern Georgia, exploring nearby coastlines and crashing at my aunt and uncle’s house each night. It was undoubtedly a good time: jokes were told, laughs were shared and — for lack of a less-clichéd phrase — memories were made.
Occasionally I like to depart from the hallowed halls of the Alderman Maps room to study somewhere more exposed and in tune with the real world, which does in fact exist outside the borders of U.Va. Last semester, as I sat in the Barnes and Noble at Barracks, happy to be surrounded by books and congratulating myself for breaking out of my college-student bubble, someone slid into the seat next to mine.
A while ago, I went on a day-long trip to the Eastern Shore. I woke up early, got in the car, and drove east until I hit the James River, three hours later. There, I met up with my godmother, who caravanned with me from Newport News to Yorktown to Williamsburg. It was, all in all, a lovely day spent exploring small cities along the water and embracing the warm fall weather and sunny, cloudless skies. We grabbed dinner outside in Williamsburg as we caught up on each other’s lives since we’d last met. A one-man band strummed his guitar in the background. Then I got back in my car and headed home to Charlottesville.
In an attempt to engage my sentimental side, I often find myself sparing some precious moments of study time and indulging in The New York Times’ Modern Love columns. Believe me when I say they’re not as sappy as they sound. Through these columns, I’ve taken in short snippets about everything from war, addiction, technology, religion and, inevitably, Tinder.
I began a routine last year where I would go to two different coffee shops within a single hour in an afternoon, every other afternoon. This wasn’t necessarily to fuel any sort of caffeine addiction but rather was done out of convenience: I needn’t bore you with the details, but take my word for it — it made perfectly logical sense.
As much as it pains me to admit to such a typical, regular and average thing, I am from the not-so-mysterious suburban wonderland of “NoVA.”
My roommate hates interventions. I learned this last spring when I took on the role of mother and demanded she get some more sleep, for her own good. This had always been a lighthearted, laughable point of contention between us, but things got “serious” when said friend began falling asleep in the library so habitually that regular Alderman-goers began to stealthily snap pictures of her snoozing on the oh-so comfortable chairs of the Maps Room. Talk even started to circulate of starting an Instagram account entitled “Naps in Maps” to document such moments.
I came into the past two months a bit blind. Family and friends ushered me abroad to Johannesburg, South Africa with heartfelt, temporary goodbyes and near-synchronous sighs of “Oh, how we’ll miss you!” I responded by shrugging off emotion and smartly retorting that these next several weeks would be no different than those spent in Charlottesville during the school year. Yes, I was many miles away, but at the end of the day, wasn’t going abroad just like going away to school?
I first heard the term “Life Graphs” during a summer-job-related, getting-to-know-you spiel. It sounds cynical — and potentially stonewallish — of me, but my initial thought was “No, hell no.” Hard pass, no way, I won’t, can’t make me.
Before leaving school for summer, a friend of mine was on a new kick: giving cheese-tastic motivational speeches to her roommates to start off the morning. All of her speeches were delivered almost entirely in jest. They were sarcastically self-described by my friend as “highly inspirational” and “truly heartwarming” and ranged from cliché quotations to powerful reminders like, “There’s no time like the present!”
There must a time warp out there somewhere. Believe it or not, over the past several months I’ve realized my life operates at two opposing speeds.
“Purple rain…I never thought it would end with Purple Rain.”
Although spring break just ended, allow me to time travel momentarily back into the cold, merciless weeks that were winter break. It was during those weeks when I embarked on a spontaneous, and very memorable four-day drive from south-central New Mexico to Washington, D.C. For what it stole in gas, the trip made up for in interesting anecdotes.
My childhood was full of oft-repeated clichés. This may explain my overly optimistic spirit and tendency to end advice-filled monologues to friends with uplifting aphorisms.
Call me my father’s daughter, but I’ll be damned if I don’t love nachos. Yet never had I thought my love of chips and cheese would be correlated with the success in my, erm, love life.
Now that it’s over, I can confess to the world that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at the start of sorority rush. When family members inquired during Winter Break, where-oh-where was I rushing, my response was an unfailingly honest, “wherever will have me,” accompanied by a laugh of — hopefully — endearing self-pity.
I never knew exactly what Boxing Day was until my Canadian cousin explained it to me during Winter Break.
It might have been the “one-step-closer-to-being-empty-nesters” panic that caused my parents to adopt a wide-eyed, sweet-hearted puppy a mere two weeks after I left for school. But whatever the cause, adopt a puppy they did. When I returned home for Winter Break, I arrived just in time to take the new dog, Brogen, on her first trip to the dog park.