Back on break

Home is quiet, very quiet, and dark in a way that an industrialized wonderland like Chicago can never be. I have my bedroom and a separate bathroom and rooms and rooms beyond--so many rooms, with so much furniture, and so much stuff, everywhere, books and photos and computers and lamps and the clutter of three lifetimes. There's my senile ginger-colored cat and my sweet, exasperating parrot and eighteen turkeys who hang around my backyard waiting for my mom to throw them scraps. There's 8 acres of land and the beehives and the brook, swollen with recent rain, and dead gardens and yellow-green stretches of grass. There's my double bed and the tv from the 1980s in my room that hasn't worked in years.

Living in a box for months, you forget that most other people's lives are lived in more space than that, at least in New England, at least where I'm from. You forget that people own whole houses and yards and pets and have numerous televisions; you forget that wild animals beyond gray squirrels and sparrows, omnipresent in Chicago, exist. It has rained almost nonstop since I got home Saturday night, down pouring, great buckets of water everywhere, whereas I left Chicago just before a snowstorm and subzero temperatures moved in. I will have all winter to freeze to death along the shores of Lake Michigan, but I do wish it were colder and snowier here now, instead of pouring, instead of miserable rain in the middle of December.

Being home is such a conflicting thing for any college student, I think. Being on break is wonderful; too much work has gone on the past eleven weeks, and I can fully relish the time off, although U of C's schedule makes it so that you don't quite know what to do with yourself when you don't have piles of work to do. At the same time, being home is bizarrely uncomfortable; everyone you run into, at least in a town this size, in New England, feels the need to point out your presence, remark on it, ask you how things are. College is anonymous, relatively speaking, where anything you do, no matter how crazy, isn't remarkable because someone else has no doubt done something crazier. In short, at home you stick out like a sore thumb, and you often find that the things you may have daydreamed of during your achier moments at school are not what you remembered.

So I'm glad to be home, glad to see some people (once I actually do; currently I have done little more than lie around and read all day), but am also already looking forward to going back to school. The workload ahead does not please me any more than the workload this past quarter pleased me, but the people, the places, the shared camaraderie of Karl Marx and awkward late adolescence are all terribly familiar to me in a way that home is no longer. Last year was a bewildering mixture of excitement and random spurts of horrific dread and stupefying loneliness at times, but now all has calmed down to the point where I begin to feel real love for Chicago, despite its oddities, where I can count on one hand the number of times that I've thought of high school or my life before Chicago in anything more than a very passing manner, as a "Oh yeah, I think someone I went to school with had done that/gone there/had that happen to them" sort of thing.

So tonight, curiously, I miss Chicago, miss laughing over nonsense with many other college-aged students and pretending to be an adult. Missing anything in life is stupid, I know; missing does nothing to bring anything back and detracts from the glory of whatever is in front of you at the moment (and there probably is something glorious about every moment, if you look for it). Sometimes just a dose of heartsickness, however, a dose of sorrow can be curiously cathartic, a wonderful reminder of how good times were in the past (even in the recent past of two weeks ago!) and how good you want to make them in the meantime.