A Letter Home (II)

october 25, 2019

Incidentally, I write this again at midnight. It doesn’t feel as early as it did three years ago, though—now, I enjoy reasonable bedtimes and the chill of early mornings, when the campus is quietest, still steeped in dreams. Mom, Dad, you’d be happy to know that I sleep a lot better now. I have set aside the hours before breakfast for myself, and as a result I treasure those moments in the brisk autumn air, breathing in the sunrise. 

Confession? School continues to kick my ass. Another confession? I still—somehow—love it. You may have expected these long months to have worn away at the magic of Stanford, breaking it (and me) down into brittle, cynical pieces. In some ways, I suppose that’s true. The utopian vision of college—which I see reflected so long ago, in the post that mirrors this one—no longer exists. Instead, it has been replaced by something realer, heavier, and so, so much better.

Yes, I miss home. Home—the word has evolved beyond a place; it now gravitates around a people. A group of loved ones who have taught me, over these five weeks and three years, what it means to grow into myself: to laugh until I cannot breathe; to open up and ask for help; to always say yes to new adventures. My home is North Carolina because of you, my family, to whom I will always dedicate my letters. Yet I’ve realized that the definition is fluid, ever changing; home is this red-roofed, yellow-bricked, sun-soaked campus whose roads and sidewalks I have run a thousand times; home is the fog lifting itself gently off the hills; home is the way my breath catches—even now, five weeks and three years later—every time I remember that this is the place where I have had the privilege to learn, about myself and about the world, and about the kind of person that I want to be.

You know, probably better than I do, that I have struggled throughout my time here. Last year, in particular—I thought I had lost the happiest parts of myself. I really believed, for a time, that I would carry the burden of sadness alone.

Now I am happy. I am so, so happy. Sure, the childish idealism of a perfect college experience has faded, wrung out of me long ago, but I think about what I have instead and I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I have rediscovered the simple pleasure of curling up on the couch in the lounge with a book for an hour, a cup of tea balanced on the arm beside me. I am running again. I am eating three square meals a day. And, finally, I am spending each and every one of my precious moments left with the people who always bring out my best; the people through whom I have found myself. To me, they are pure warmth, soft and persistent, melting me from the inside out. 

It is absurd, and sad, and rather insane, to think that in eight short months I will be graduating. I have been a student for seventeen years. It’s an identity shift that I’m not quite prepared to accept. I feel like I’ve just found my footing. And now, they tell me, it is time to move on.

Mom, Dad, Adri—when I wrote three years ago, I told you: This place hasn’t settled yet. It will never be ordinary, but it is still new. I want you to know this, now: that three years later, it still hasn’t settled. It will never be ordinary. Yet in these three years, I have crafted my own story; I have learned Stanford like a language; and I have realized this—the only way to really know it, in the end, was to untether myself from everything that scared me (which, you know, is quite a lot). To understand that it would never settle, but to teach myself that I was strong enough to stay upright.

12:39 a.m. Once I finish writing I will brush my teeth, climb into bed, and journal about my day. It’s an inspired habit, one I picked up recently. I want to remember every single thing about this year.

To my family: a final question; a final thought. Have I grown? I think I have. You recall, not so long ago, how easily I could crumble—how the spaces in my head were unsteady, tilted, always ready to tip and spill in pieces onto the ground. I no longer feel that way. There is something much sturdier inside of me—something that does not allow me to fall.

When I page through my journal in five, ten, fifteen years—this is what I will see. I am happy. I am loved. I am terrified of what is to come—what the future will bring, so completely unknown. But you have taught me well, and I carry within me a new warmth, a new certainty: that wherever I am in the world, you will be there. Whether I am running breathless into the frozen ocean halfway across the planet, or stealing potato chips off the snack shelf after dinner, or staring up at the stars beyond the hills, beyond the winding roads and the lights that brought us here—you will always be there, arms open, ready to welcome me home.