dreaming@dartmouth

These past few weeks have been without a doubt the most difficult of the term. Midterms, moving across campus (it's a long story.), losing friends, missing home -- I could handle everything on its own, but together, things kept bursting from the seams that I had taken so much time to stitch. Running around Baker Beach, dragging my best friend by the arm, spinning in circles, screaming to the stars; sitting on the Green and watching as the sun let go its hold on the daytime sky with fiery fingers slipping and catching amongst the leaf-forgotten trees; the hopeless hours in the library, or the extra time spent over lunch, work thrown away in favor of conversation; the first and last cigarette smoked hopelessly and absentmindedly under a tree at four in the morning, the night pulsing thick with muffled music. These were the moments from which I yearned to extract meaning, and from which meaning would not come. These were the moments I remember, not for their being, but for their should-have-been. These were the moments that I had taught myself to appreciate, the Important Things that became banalized so quickly.

And yet, this morning was different: the light curled on the edges of the leaves scattered yellow-and-orange about the ground, and the sun shone hesitatingly through the clouds and brushed the sheer white of my curtains, lighting up the string of prayer flags that looped under the top windowpane. I woke up terrified. As silly as it sounds: I had a dream that I had been kicked out of Dartmouth and that I had to transfer to the University of Alabama. My mind had taken me through the elaborate and specific instances of moving out and moving in, of navigating a strange and unwelcoming library, of seeking friends and finding strangers, of pursuing passions only to have them ignored. I can recall a sense of longing that was overwhelmingly present throughout the dream, the continuous 'when can I get back to Dartmouth?', 'Dartmouth will take me back, right?' Upon waking up, before I had quite come to grips with my familiar surroundings, that longing still lingered.

As I went through that tried-and-true schema of my morning routine, a sense of calm unlike any I had felt all term trickled through me. I was here. I was here in my room, in a building, in a cluster, at a college in New Hampshire unlike any other college in the world. At the risk of falling back on clichés, I'll say this: in the face of my newfound (and strangely found) appreciation for Dartmouth, all of my worries seemed a bit more manageable -- and, in the best cases, insignificant.

Now this is not to say, of course, that if you find yourself at the University of Alabama you have consequentially landed yourself in the middle of an existential crisis -- on the contrary. Whatever college you go to, appreciate it. Take a moment, when you're feeling overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or perhaps not enough of anything at all, to reflect on the things that are important to you about the community of which you are a part. Take pride and find solace in your ability to be a contributing individual within that community, a person among a hundred or a thousand other people who makes the place you live what it is. For me, to think about Dartmouth in that way is both thrilling and calming, like that quiet fire that burns in your chest right before something great is about to happen.