Five past midnight, Monday, March 11. I had ventured back to Ohio from an ethereal week in St. Augustine, Fla., and even though the cats of the town made me ill with their dander, spring break could’ve stayed with me until May and my life wouldn’t have been unlived. But my girlfriend made this return trip with me, so suddenly I felt I could be here without simultaneously being lost in a sea of nostalgia.
Unlocking my dorm room this semester to find someone else’s life belongings scattered across the carpet was not what I had in store for the night, the week or the remainder of the semester. An email notifying me of this upcoming event would’ve forced me to prepare myself, but with no prior warning, all I did was stare with confusion for two quiet minutes.
My new roommate is from Japan on an exchange trip with our sister school, and I guess the postcard he gave me brought good spirits back after suffering yet another loss of solitude.
It’s becoming hard to determine what life I’ll be walking into when I leave my dorm now, so I suppose the onset of a stranger who is infinitely different than me has prepared me for uncertainty quite well. Yet, it’s not just my roommate that has measured up to be a polar opposite of who I am. It’s the student body, the way I observe everyone carrying themselves that’s causing me to look at and approach people differently.
College is similar to the preteen stage of development when attaching yourself to an identity is more important than keeping yourself fed. Yet now we’re 18–22 with a little more brains and suddenly we “secure our identity” and magnify it in order to attract potential mates. This creates a certain energy in Athens and I can’t decide if it’s welcoming or unnerving. But as the story goes, I’m probably the insane one.
It’s confusing that there’s no one stereotype that dominates, yet everyone’s faces get lost in the crowd as I walk to class. Hopefully this is all prep for how it’ll feel living in a big city during my mid-20’s, but the range of emotions I go through when people-watching in Shively often exhausts me. Who are you people? I can’t pinpoint if it’s the fact that there are more than 20,000 students within the same age group, all competing to be the best at some specialized field that gives birth to these abnormal feelings, but it makes my whole mental image of college fogged.
I’ve always fancied people who are older and have lived life longer than I have; people who have been around for other time periods because the current one is becoming repetitive and I need to be told of the past so I can assure myself that the future will bring change — hopefully change that will brighten my view of the daily routine.
I need to settle and accept that these are the people I have to make do with and learn from while I’m here, even though looking at everybody together makes me feel uneasy for unknown reasons. I’m overly prepared for the day I can occupy a spot on a rocking chair placed on a wrap-around porch in the South. But until then, I strive to figure out exactly who these people are that are a part of my everyday life.
Garrett Lemery is a freshman studying communications at Ohio University and a columnist for The Post. How did you adjust to college life? Email Garrett at gl496111@ohiou.edu
