I took a wrong turn and ended up in a part of campus I had never been to before, which at the time was most of the campus. I know it was a dirt road. In retrospect, I think I ended up near the treehouses. I remember my old sneakers, dead now, on the dirt and rocks of the road, I remember the total darkness, and I remember the fear of being completely alone in a new place in the dead of night. But I also remember looking up at the stars, shining as brightly as they did back home, and finding my favorite constellation, Orion. And I remember the wonder that I felt staring up at the vastness of space that was so familiar, yet so distant and adventurous at the same time.
There’s a lot I don’t recognize about the girl standing on that road in the middle of the stars, but I recognize that feeling of wonder. I clung to that feeling, and I think it’s buoyed me through the last two-and-a-half years of my life. I needed it, too. L&T was a rough time for me. My area coordinator made a big deal about how we would get kicked out of Bard if we did anything wrong. I spent those weeks on high alert. I did more during L&T than I thought I was capable of and walked away feeling utterly wrecked, as though I had never really known anything. Then my L&T professor praised me on my first ever crite sheet, and I felt that wonder again, along with an overwhelming sense of relief.
One of my favorite classes my first semester of Freshman year, and by far the hardest, was Homer for Beginners: The Iliad and The Odyssey. I was pretty routinely up until one or two in the morning the night before that class reading despite starting my homework almost as soon as I got back to my dorm. In a lot of ways, I feel like I should’ve thought that class was hell. The first and only time I have ever called the BRAVE hotline was because I wasn’t sure if I couldn’t handle the first essay for the class. BRAVE told me to get drunk about it. I didn’t call again.
Regardless, I handled it, and without the use of alcohol. A B+ on my first ever college paper didn’t seem like too shabby a showing to me. That notion was complicated when I got to class that week. I had been used as an example plenty of times in high school, but the idea that would happen with my first college paper, in a class with plenty of upperclassmen, never even crossed my mind. Only this time I was being used as an example of what not to do. But the professor also said it was one of the highest-scoring essays in the class. I was caught in this strange place between feeling proud of myself and feeling viscerally ashamed. I had done well enough to be near the top of a class that was not all freshmen, yet at the same time the many mistakes that I had made, mistakes praised by my high school English teachers, were laid bare. I called my mom right when I got out of class, because at that point I didn’t know what to feel. Eventually, it all added up to that same vaguely-frightened feeling of wonder.
I didn’t realize it at the time, didn’t realize it until Moderation made me feel the need to wax philosophical in retrospect, but that feeling is really what has kept me going the entire time I’ve been at college. The next big thing for me was the Begin in Berlin program. It doesn’t really feel like beginning when you go for the second semester program, but I didn’t feel like nitpicking the thing that was going to get me out of the country for the first (I thought maybe only) time in my life. Before college, I had barely even left New England. The application process was fairly simple, but I still considered it to be one of the most stressful things I had ever done in my life, because to my mind so much was riding on it. I’ve never really looked at careers that will have me rolling in dough, so if I don’t travel now in college with financial aid to help me, then when? (My views on that have since changed. Once the world has been opened to you, it’s harder to convince yourself it’s been closed again.) I followed the sense of terror and wonder all the way to Germany, the feeling of elation assuring me I was on the right track despite the sharp sensation of terror scraping across my veins at the idea of going so far from home alone.
I almost lost track of this amalgamation of significant emotions once during my semester in Berlin, in what can clearly be defined as the darkest night of the soul in the story of my Freshman year. I knew this moment was coming, had been coming for years by the time it finally showed, but I had come within scant inches of praying to a God I don’t believe in that it wouldn’t happen while I was away in Berlin. My grandpa, who had been slowly wasting away due to dementia for years at that point, died. I think the sensation of the moment I heard will be burned into my mind for as long as I live. It was a bright, sunny day contrary to what literary themes about weather would have me believe. I had been walking one of my friends back to her dorm so we could talk more, and my phone started ringing. My phone had been on silent, but for some reason I took it out anyway, and saw my mom’s face taking up the screen. I felt an immediate sense of dread. When I answered, she asked if my classes were done for the day, and when I confirmed that they were she told me that Grandpa had died in the middle of the night in his sleep. No one ever told me of what.
In the middle of the street in Berlin, I began sobbing. I hated that I was out in the open, but I couldn’t help it. My friend walked me back to my dorm and checked if I was okay several times before leaving. I tried to talk to my RA, but she wasn’t there. The whole week after that passed in a blur. I don’t really know any of what happened in a significant way. My roommate made sure I made it to meals. People offered me tea all the time. I had never liked tea before, but I didn’t have the capacity to do anything but accept it. I don’t think I was really capable of tasting anything at that point, anyway. Even now, thinking about this moment in my life sends psychosomatic pain ripping through my chest. The one-year anniversary is coming up in a month. I don’t really know how I’m going to handle it.
Still, I was in Berlin, Germany, out of the country for the first time in my life. Everyone kept asking if I wanted to go home, and honestly I did if only for a while, but my family doesn’t have the money for that to have been an option, so I always replied with a firm no. Even if I had been able to go home, Grandpa’s ghost would’ve haunted me if I did. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and he would’ve thought it incredibly stupid to give up an opportunity like that to go back to a place he wasn’t anymore just because he went and died. So I didn’t miss a class, I kept moving, I went to one of the best ice cream places in Berlin with some of my friends, and I got a tattoo of an island he used to take us camping on when my brother and I were kids. I kept moving through the motions and hoped at some point that would work.
It didn’t really, at least not until Spring Break. In my opinion, the spring semester is the best time to travel. It’s pretty easy to get from place to place on the other side of the pond, so you can go wherever you want for Spring Break. For me, the place was Scotland. This wasn’t why I decided, I had started planning before Grandpa died, but his last name was Jameson. It’s a few generations back, but that side of my family came over from Scotland. I traveled from Edinburgh to Inverness, and spent a few days on the shore of Loch Ness looking for Nessie. I really felt like Grandpa was with me the whole time I was there. Especially when I was on the water. I remember Grandpa being happiest on his boat. I tell people I was looking for Nessie, but maybe it’s really him I was looking for. If that’s true, I’m certain I found him.
I came back from that break better than ever. I was more confident than I had ever felt in my life. The fact that I had planned the trip, actually gone to Scotland, run around the countryside, and made it back in one piece was nothing short of a miracle to me. I couldn’t believe it. Using the public transit in Germany had been really intimidating to me, a country kid, almost the whole time, but after Scotland it felt like nothing. I went on adventures, studied, and had a great time. My very last weekend in Germany I spent a night on the coast right near the border of Germany and Poland. The first day, some friends and I walked to Poland and had a beach day there. There was no one at the border, and we just enjoyed a walk through the forest. The border was marked, so we knew the exact day we made the switch. The last day we relaxed on the beach.
This might sound crazy, but my favorite part of traveling might actually be coming home. By the time I was boarding the plane back to New York, it had been four months. I’d never been out of the north east that long before, let alone out of the country. I cannot properly describe how excited I was when I saw the rocky Atlantic coast. The day before I had been on a beach in Germany, and it looked just like what you usually see in the movies. Soft white sand disappearing into the horizon, not a rock in sight, and I actually like our beaches better. I love the rocks. I love the pockets of life that get caught in the tidepools. And it had been way too long since I had appreciated all of that properly. My dad and my brother came to get me at the airport (my brother was a surprise) and we had one last adventure in the city. I fell asleep to the fading lights. And I felt wonder.
