CotW: Leaving Connecticut College (Again)

Seven years ago I graduated from Connecticut College.

Approximately 10 months ago, I returned to Conn as a Practicum Trainee in the Student Counseling Services office. For 20 hours a week, I sat with clients from the student population and, hopefully, helped them out in some small measure.

Tonight, I just completed my last full shift in that role. For the second time in my life, I am done with Conn.

Needless to say, the nostalgia’s kicking in just a bit.

Conn's current mascot, The Camel. Or Nessie, if you prefer

Knowing the end was near, I engendered to visit my old haunts, the places that I remembered and that meant something to me when I was an undergrad all those years ago. Why not go all out on the walk down memory lane, right?

I started at a dorm called Windham. Not because it was the most significant to me, but because it was closest to Health Services. I am nothing if not efficient in my movements. I stood in the alley that runs from a staircase to Conn’s main road and pictured a Conn from 1999—my freshman year…I’m not changing the timeline on you here—and let 2010 slip into the background. I thought about the triple whose backdoor I was standing outside. I thought about the three freshman girls who lived there who became my friends, Aubrey B., Nina B., and Noelle B. (yeah, no kidding on that). I realized that while all three are my Facebook friends, I only speak to one of them now.

Then I raised my eyes to the third floor, visualizing a room that was smaller than my every single I lived in at Conn but was labeled a double by the school. There lived Jenn Z., the first person at Conn, outside my roommate John H., who I counted as a friend I made on my own, not just someone my roommate met first and introduced me to. I can remember sitting cross legged in the hallway outside her room, sweating like crazy in the near tropic climate of that third floor, but enjoying the conversation enough to not much give a damn. She and I once talked for three hours in Cro, the student center. She ended up dating my roommate for most of our college career. I have not spoken to her since we graduated, I’m not even Facebook friends with her (HORROR!), but I hear she’s engaged these days.

Windham is wrung out of memories so I keep wandering. I head through the chapel where I’d occasionally sneak into just to be there. I’m not sure why…I only attended service there four times—the four Ash Wednesdays of my college years—but it always felt…comfortable? I’m a bit disappointed to find that that that magic seems to have been extinguished. It feels very much like an empty building and not much else.

I peek my head in at Bill Hall, the psych building, and find it as visually unpleasant as ever. I understand the downstairs lecture hall, a miserable place where someone had the bright idea to paint over the windows with beige, is much better now, but with the door locked and the lights out, I can only get a sense of it.

Then, it is across the green, with a stop at the Sundial. I giggle a little as I remember a particularly raunchy anecdote involving a friend of mine that occurred there. And off we go again.

And so it goes. I visit the Senior Art Exhibit in Cummings. The dominant themes this year appear to be religiosity and body/body horror images. Not my bag, but I appreciate it and I promise myself to return more often to campus to see these things. Even as I make the promise I know there is no chance I’ll fulfill it. I’d love to, but I know me and I know something always comes up.

Then down past the Lyman Allyn Museum, with a brief pause at the crest of the hill, remembering how many times I walked out here with friends, and how many of those conversations were silly as can be and ended in laughing fits, or deeply serious and ending in tears. My best tally puts the latter out in front of the former.

The Plex, a set of six dorms that housed me my entire time at Conn, comes next. I don’t even bother trying to get in, there’s something just a touch creepy about that to me, and instead just walk a wide circle around the horseshoe of buildings. It occurs to me now, writing this, that that is not necessarily less creepy.

I think of meeting my roommate for the first time, doing my first shot with him—of terrible, terrible vodka—all that good roommate stuff. I cringe as I think of my worst day of my entire time at Conn involving a missed opportunity to see Dogma, two awkward car rides marked by arguments and getting lost, a dresser covered in alcohol that I did not drink, two people making out on the floor of my friend, another two making out in a bed, and me, very very much alone. (There’s more, but that’s a pretty good overview); that happened in my Freshman double. I remember wide open windows in January and sleep talking and walking. I recall the moment when I realized that whole “redefining yourself for college” thing just was not in the cards for me. Who I was was way too encoded on my DNA to change.

I pondered it all. The knock at my door from someone bleeding out of their wrist and the hurried trek across campus to the health center—back when it was open 24 hours a day—the gigantic Senior single where I found room for two couches, a bed that was left empty nearly every Thursday as I laid out the College Voice with a collection of about 12 compatriots while the rest of the campus got drunk, danced, fought, hooked up, or failed to hook up and cried. I ruminated on the hall parties, the Super Bowl parties, the Oscar parties, the rounds of Goldeneye after dinner, the sound of clippers as I had my head shaved for the first time. I held it all inside of me, feeling my skin tingle like it was being wrapped in a cold breeze. Then I exhaled, breaking the spell.

I headed back to the health center, careful to walk through Cro, past the Voice offices where I met some of the best friends I’ve ever had and the small studio where I put on a series of one acts and monologues my senior year and finally purged all the ghosts of past relationships I had had hanging on me.

Done with my little jaunt, I jumped into my car and rolled off campus on to Route 32. As I eased my way back home, I passed an exit for Providence, RI and entertained the idea of taking it. My freshman year, the day after my worst day ever, I had what I still think of as my best college moment ever. My roommate, Noelle B., Jenn Z, and myself found ourselves desperately bored at a party and decided to go driving. A plan to go Starbucks evaporated in our inability to find one and we seemed to be destined to return to campus. Then, someone jokingly suggested we head to Rhode Island instead. We laughed and then Jenn said, “Do you really want to?” and with that off we went. I could not tell you conversations we had that night or jokes that were made, or even where the hell in Rhode Island we ended up—it was beach, but beyond that, nothing—I just remember the feeling. It was just one of those moments where everything goes still and you just live in it without worrying. Maybe that feeling is just a right turn away again, right?

But that Rhode Island does not exist anymore. I mean, Rhode Island is still there, of course, although it will be part of Connecticut by 2020, I expect. But that moment, those people, they existed for only that brief span of time on an unusually warm November in 1999. Some part of me would love to go back there. Would love to listen to “Blue” at a ridiculously high volume while John danced in his own peculiar, shame-free kind of way. Would love to sit in Cro for hours talking about everything and nothing just because we had the time. Would love to lay out the Voice, feel the rush of another completed issue. Would love to be in my late teens and early 20’s again.

But then I’d also be someone’s sidekick again. I’d be listening to my classmates party their hearts out while I was stone cold sober and very aware that I’d only be getting a brief nap before my 8:30 Chemistry class again. I’d be unhappy, and tired, and sick, and everything negative that’s part of life, too. Because no amount of rose colored glasses can change the fact that college, like life, was hardly a nonstop joyfest.

Nostalgia is fine, but it’s not life. The Connecticut College of 1999-2003 is a memory. Now, at this Conn, I work, I don’t go to class. There’s no John H., there’s a Mark H., my roommate’s much younger brother. The Voice lays out on Sundays now, not Thursdays, and I don’t think it takes them all night. Sarah C., Britt H., Clancy G., Ben M., Jordan G., Dan H., and everyone else I’ve mentioned and haven’t are not even ghosts on this campus anymore. Neither am I. I’m a Doctoral Candidate. I’m married. I’m a friggin’ homeowner for goodness sake. And the truth is this is what I want. No second bite at the college apple is worth giving all this up, not even for my best college moment. I’ve already beaten that moment—my first check from Marvel complete with crouched Spider-Man logo, the phone call from the University of Hartford telling me that I was in their Psy D program, the rush of thrill I felt when I said “I do.” And I’m going to keep beating it. Someday I’ll watch a child of mine score their first goal or go to prom or get married. I’ll successfully discharge my first client as a fully licensed psychologist. I’ll do stuff I’m not even expecting right now. And I’ll think, “Damn, can you imagine giving this up for doing college again?”

I am standing on the precipice of 30 and yes, that’s lot scarier than the precipice of 20, but so what? What’s life without a little fear, right?

So, I turn the windshield wipers on and angle my car back towards home. My life is waiting and I am done with all this nostalgia.

Goodbye, Conn. Thanks for the memories. And I promise I’ll remember to donate to the Alumni Fund this year…probably.