This being my last semester at WSU, I’ve been thinking about freshman year a lot lately, something about ends being intrinsically linked to beginnings.
I remember rushing around in the rain drinking shitty Hillside coffee, covering bullshit stories because I hadn’t proven myself at the Evergreen yet.
I didn’t have a real coat for months, and I froze my ass off.
I ran and ran and ran and ran on the Rec treadmills and still managed to weigh more than I do now.
We chugged every ounce of alcohol we could get our hands on back then. Vodka, rum, liqueurs … we drank until everything went black, until the nights turned into a tilt-a-whirl blur of faces, phrases, events. Mostly, we drank in the dorms, spilling over each other, taking snapshots of our trophies, our empty bottles and new friends.
I became fascinated with Latin American history, etching names like Villa and Guadalupe Hidalgo into my journal like senatorial giants, still wondering about Henry Clay and Frederick Jackson Turner.
My favorite part of most days was reading the New York Times, flat by flat, with a bowl of plain white rice and srichacha. I’d spend hours on the phone with a boy in California.
Sometimes, I’d go to my favorite spot in Holland, Elliott on my earphones, and write bad poems about loneliness and textbooks and forgotten loves. About my mom’s cancer, which I couldn’t control. About my need to be thin, about the numbers on the scale, dutifully recorded daily in a secret place.
I wondered why the other girls didn’t like me. (Still wondering that one …)
My first roommate, I’ll leave her unnamed, was awful. That’s why I moved in with Scartown in December. Scar didn’t sleep with random, skanky boys and gossip about me to mutual friends. She didn’t blowdry her hair while I was sleeping or have “Crazy Bitch” go off on her phone every few hours in the middle of the night. She didn’t give me dirty, dismissive glances for curling up over yet another thick, yellow novel from the library, for hauling my ass to the rec every night, for my babbling about the school newspaper.
Back then, I was terrified of the Evergreen. I took a few stories from a squirrelly past editor and gave up for awhile. When the staff shifted over, a new editor treated me like a real person and taught me to streamline my stories.
I guess freshman year was about beginning the process of becoming an adult, about becoming a college student, about steering a course through a rough start in moving up in the world.
In a lot of ways, that process is ongoing. Catalysts are plenty, along with setbacks.
Because graduating from college will be one of the biggest endings, I know and hope it will also be one of the biggest beginnings.
Right?
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