Friends Back East

Welcome to your new home
Here's your bed, you sleep alone
Getting everything you wanted
Getting everything you wanted and some
Here's the kitchen, cook alone
Look at the water boil.




I am officially a Chicago transplant on the east coast, and I wont lie its going to be tough. Of course there are the financial challenges that I have to face until I get my fellowship check (I'm hanging on by just a few hairs) but there's so much more to adjust to. And these are the things I have yet to even fully process.

There is, of course, the adjustment of being away from so many of the people I know so well, and who have come to know me. Out here, its just my girlfriend and I sleeping on air mattress on the floor at night in a largely empty apartment. And my air mattress deflated last night. It is disorienting to know that I will not run into anyone I know as I explore campus. There will be no recognition or catching up. Even the people I do know here in Princeton are known only from one small weekend back in March. I both relish and fear this state of being, because being unknown liberates us from fulfilling expectations as well as traps us to the scrutiny that a bug under a lamp would experience.

This is the melodrama of the twenty-something year olds everywhere. We are cut fresh from college and sent into the winds. Some of us have had to leave behind everything and everyone we ever knew in order to take the next steps in our lives, but those steps are truly uncertain. I don't really feel the same way I did when I started college- my unbridled optimism about the next step is replaced with cautious enjoyment. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I know there are many people I grew up with who are feeling the same thing.

I'm not writing to complain about anything, because I think I have very little to complain about. I am in a very privileged position in terms of what I get to do for the next 6 years. Yes, I am desperately low on cash, and my furniture consists of a dining set and several boxes. But that really doesn't matter in the long run. What I am trying to vent, in some degree, is the fact that after college some of us feel really lost even when it seems like our lives should be figured out. Entering grad school isn't the period on the last phase of my life. Everything runs together. Grad school is me from last year without a city that he knows, or even loves. I don't know much about Princeton other than the fact that I am going to try and make my home here.

All homes have a moment when they are made. But at the same time, I am never going to really leave my old home behind. That's why I will always be from Chicago when it comes right down to it. We are all fortunate that, as we move into the post-college landscape, we are able to bring something- however intangible and tacit it really is- along with us.

So many people from my generation are now looking a new landscape in the eye. There is not the certainty of protection inside the institutions and homes we use to know. We are instead forced to not only forge ourselves continuously, but also new spaces in which we must live. Its exciting and unsettling, but its everything we really wanted. It just doesn't look like we imagined it, yet.


The song quoted at the top of this post is "Friends Back East" by Jawbreaker, from which the title is also taken.