The home wavelength

My newsfeed on Facebook has become cluttered with a few common themes: "FINALLY DONE FINALS YAY!" (from friends at other schools), "Where are my grades?" or, alternately, "This quarter sucked" (from, of course, fellow Chicagoans), and then the curiously amusing "XYZ college class of 2015!" from current seniors at my old high school who have heard back from early action or early decision schools. Thanks to Facebook and another day of gossip at said high school today, I now know where several people are going, where one kid has been deferred, and where many of the rest are applying, to put their fates in the hands of the regular decision application pool.

Never mind the fact that "class of 2015" makes me feel extremely old, in a way that "class of 2014" (only one year off my own graduation year of 2013) couldn't quite manage. Why two years instead of one hits home isn't really clear, but I haven't thought about anything occurring in 2015, two full years after my own college graduation. I'm beginning to think, half in jest and half seriously, that I may be living in a cardboard box in 2015, but it's still far enough removed from the present that such an idea is more amusing than it is frightening. It's similar to how it's hard for those of us under the age of 22 or 23 to take any economic news seriously; we kind of delude ourselves that by the time we are facing the job market, things will have to be better, or maybe we'll just run away to Europe or Australia or something. Never mind, of course, the fact that you can hardly just run away to another country (immigration laws are strict everywhere, unless you marry a national of that country) or that other countries are in equally bad shape.

Thinking about how these kids who, last I knew, were awkward sophomores just emerging out of the pit of moodiness that is early adolescence are now applying, and in some cases even committing, to colleges is bizarre. When I last was home in September, they were still all mostly confused, annoyed, and not looking forward to the college application process at all, and now a few of them are already done. At this time two years ago, in December 2008, I myself was already done, really, sitting on a gorgeous early action acceptance letter from the University of Chicago and awaiting the financial aid decision that would seal the deal. It was so exciting. It wasn't until maybe March or April, as other people sealed their own college deals, that I realized just how much the past thirteen years of my life had been scripted by the rhythms of the public school system and how weird it would be to find an entirely new rhythm to serve me for the next four years. What do you do when you don't have school to dictate what you'll do with your waking hours? College's dictations are different than those of high school, but there is still the obligation of classes and homework and papers and exams.

Being home and lounging around with a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds takes me back a bit to that old, high school rhythm, without really immersing me in it. Last year at this time it was almost literally breathtaking to return and remember life as it had been, barely six months previously. My heart would race when I approached the high school, both as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome thing (just remembering every bad test, every absolutely menial and joyless day) and as a strange kind of confused and resistant joy to being back home, in those hallways my feet still could traverse automatically.

Today and yesterday there was no emotion, positive or negative, no real awkwardness or fear of being called out for walking the halls I left behind in June 2009. Last year there was the fear of somehow falling back into high school, the fear of finding something there that would make me entirely unwilling to return to Chicago--the fear, in short, of remembering positive things about that experience we all vilified so heavily throughout. Being happy in Chicago was natural, but it depended in part on being able to vilify high school, my home town, everything that had come before. When the bloom came off the rose in February and the happy memories of time before June 2009 came swirling in, that defiant happiness of autumn quarter last year had to change and figure out how to incorporate all that had been happy in 8th grade, in 11th grade, in 12th grade, in Latin classes and with friends at lunch and after school. I had to finally put to rest the teenager, rebelling in part because actually enjoying anything or anyone was threatening to her oh-so-tenuous sense of independent self, and find the adult who finally understands that agreeing with other people and enjoying their company doesn't mean that she's lost herself in them.

The home wavelength even now feels at times like it's threatening to overwhelm me again, threatening to nullify all the things and people I've done and seen and met in the past year and a half since I left my parents' immediate control. Whenever that starts up again, however, I remind myself that my sophomores are now becoming members of the college class of 2015 at institutions all over the place, that my freshmen are starting college tours of their own, that a few of my favorite teachers from high school have left for greener pastures--in short, that everything changes, that clinging to life as it was is utterly pointless but so too is vilifying all that went before. My seniors, they are now, are different people from who they were when they were sophomores, just as my juniors are so different from their freshmen selves, just as my Latin teacher's smile is more worn and complicated than it was on the last day of my senior year. I loved them as they were and, if I really care about their lives and my own, as I want to, as I want to feel that depth of involvement and emotion, I love them as they are and as who they will be.