Erin Seabolt Bond

This is being back on campus: The other day, on my way to my office from my first class, I passed a guy playing a guitar and a harmonica, just standing there with his back toward the pond and the clocktower, facing the waves of students going to and from class. On my way out of my last class that same day, I passed a group of students, maybe six of them, singing while one of them played a ukulele.

That night, I dreamed that Jesse and I were students again, first years (but married), and we had a great dorm room in a really fancy dorm on a really fancy campus (hey, it was a dream), and after we unpacked our things we left the room and met up with some friends and had no plans other than exploring campus.

Three of my nieces are starting college for the first time this year. On Facebook, they post pictures of their dorm rooms, and their status updates are all about early morning classes and meeting new friends and going home for the weekend.

Sometimes I ache for that. And I’ve been wondering, why?

The question has been bouncing around my brain for a week or so, and I think I’ve stumbled upon an answer. It goes something like this: The day I moved out of my parents’ house and into my first apartment, a wave of homesickness I wasn’t prepared for hit me as I sat alone in my new room. And then Scott and Jesse and I went out to dinner at some Tex-Mex place, and I felt better, was reminded of the excitement, was reminded I wasn’t alone. In the weeks afterward we’d meet up for lunch on campus or we’d go to Taco Bell at 2:00 in the morning, just because we could.

For the last two years of school, Jesse and I lived in apartments across the street from one another. After class, I’d grab a book and head over to their place and just hang out. Maybe the boys would play a video game, or maybe we’d talk about politics or philosophy or homework, or maybe we’d all just sit and study together. My roommate Marianne and I would sit in our living room and study for finals together. And even though we didn’t study the same thing, it was enough to be in the same room, eating bowls of cherries. And when it wasn’t finals week, we’d cook dinner together, we’d look at recipes, we’d watch Food Network back when Rachael Ray still just had one show, and we’d work puzzles with Samie, and we’d carve pumpkins and make gingerbread houses.

Our lives were lived in concert, and we had a rhythm, the semester-long ups and downs, the midterms and finals. We shared a campus; we went to the same movies, the same football games, the same restaurants.

Even though I think the community we have now is considerably closer than many others get to enjoy once past the college experience, it’s still a post-grad community of married people who own their own houses. We don’t hang out anymore. Getting together with friends involves cooking dinner or going out to dinner, going to a movie (a half-hour drive away), going to the beach, etc. It’s a production. It’s scheduled, often a week or more in advance. Outside of small group, we rarely see the same people on even a weekly basis, and some of our friends we might see once a month.

I never needed an invitation to Jesse and Scott’s apartment. I just needed to know if they were back from class yet or not. And vice versa. It was expected, it was natural.

So, while I very much enjoy being back on a college campus—the impromptu music and the library and all the opportunities that come along with academia—I do still miss being an undergrad, miss the evenings when Jesse, Scott, and I sat around trying to figure out what to eat and decided to walk to Big Daddy’s for pizza, feeling like the world was ours, knowing that it was.