It was the Wednesday of finals week, and, like any other studious student at my university I decided to take a little vacation in the middle of finals week. An eight-hour, life changing, outlook altering experience.
I’m not sure if it’s still the afterglow talking. I never am any more. Perhaps it was a permanent change of outlook, perhaps it was just coming with the arrival of a summer I don’t think I will ever forget.
The terrible thing about college is that you have to fit your life into a car. Moving out is worse than moving in, because somehow you have managed to accumulate an astronomical amount of crap. The amount of garbage pains me. As if we college students aren’t producing enough already, they actually have to bring out a walk-in dumpster. I spent most of my last day trying to surreptitiously fill that dumpster with the empty handles from our room without anyone seeing me. I have actually danced inside one of those dumpsters, but we will come back to that later.
What you bring to your dorm is your core self, the basic things you need to survive and the little mementos you’ve picked up along the way that you need to get by. Some bring more than others, and more of different things. I always love going into other peoples’ dorm rooms because you can immediately tell what kind of person they are. If they have a lot of photos of their friends, they have posters of their favorite bands, they have books, bongs, bulletin boards, each object gives a little insight because they chose to bring it here. The neat, sparse ones are the ones that fill me with a sort of unease. This is someone, I think, who is not so grounded, who can pick up and take off in the blink of an eye. I am part of both of these worlds, in that I have put up and taken down the same set of pictures dozens of times, in dozens of rooms in several countries. I put up my cluttered mess of a life and I take it down again like it’s nothing. I can’t live without my stuff but I can go anywhere because the stuff is two-dimensional and I can just pack it up and take it with me. I don’t accumulate dust, really. It’s a shame.
I was giggling for much of it, simply because it was such a new, different feeling. It was like being in love for the first time, when the feeling is so sweeping that on its way by it grabs your lips and pulls them into a smile, or like bubble baths or trying champagne for the first time, where you just feel silly and you want to laugh.
That is the danger in it, though. If you got a chance to go to heaven, would you ever really want to leave?
