Back from a whirlwind tour of the East Coast. I feel like my post-college life has been a stretched-out accordion: all the feelings and thoughts dispersed over a long period of uneventful time and space. But during this trip someone or something decided to try and make a noise by compressing everything, and all things of the recent past and the near future came together in the small sliver of one week and a pocket of the country.
I flew from San Jose to Baltimore, and had a long conversation with the passenger next to me. I’m not good at starting talk with strangers, but lately I’ve encountered several very open strangers who have been easy and interesting to talk to. This stranger did aircraft maintenance for the Coast Guard, and because this entailed quite a bit of travel, he’d been all over the place, from Alaska to China (he showed me photos on his computer). We talked about cities and food, and he told me a bit about Baltimore since he’d been living there for a couple of years.
I had a very hazy idea of how I should get to campus after I got off the plane. All I knew was that I didn’t want to shell out $30 for a taxi, and that somehow the light rail plus some other form of public transportation would take me to Hopkins. Though no one knew exactly how I should do this, everyone was very nice and helpful. Practically every stranger I spoke to in Baltimore (and being directionless me, I spoke to many) was super nice to me, which gave me a warm impression of the city despite what people say. I got on the light rail and had another good conversation with a stranger, a middle-aged man commuting home from work, who seemed as proud of me for pursuing medicine as if I were his own daughter. His smile showed a genuine sense of gratitude and pride, something that I haven’t seen in such a pure form in awhile.
I was going to take the subway from one of the stops but was told I’d have to transfer light rails to do that, so I got off at a random stop near the symphony, was told that the school was six or seven blocks away but that they were long blocks and that I couldn’t walk it. So I took a taxi which didn’t cost me much at all and gave me a chance to converse with a down-to-earth cabbie who kindly, bluntly told me that I better be careful “cause this hospital is in the hood.” He also told me exactly which streets we were taking as we were driving, which I forgot instantly but still appreciated.
I hurried to drop off my things because I wanted to get dinner at the Inner Harbor before it got too late. Eugenie saw me at the front desk at Reed Hall and called out my name. She told me she and her roommate, who was hosting a friend who was also interviewing, were going to go to the Harbor and asked me to come along. We never spoke much in college, but she was so welcoming and sweet that it seemed natural to hang out. She showed me their suite in Reed, I met a lot of first-years, and got to use the subway that no one in Baltimore seemed to know about or use. Since it was late Thursday night, the Harbor was pretty deserted, and it was a nice way to quietly take in the city. I was grateful for having run into Eugenie, and it became a running theme of the weekend, having familiar people in unfamiliar, different places.
After my interview the next day, I took the train to DC. It was raining and wet and a bit of an ordeal to get to Baltimore’s Penn Station, but it felt nice to get there and sit for awhile to wait for the train. After the three train trips I took during this trek, I’ve developed a fondness for train stations. I used to think it was just NY’s Grand Central that I liked, having met and departed from Andrew there a few times over those years. But no, a lot of train stations are unexpectedly nice (the unexpected came from New Haven’s small but beautiful train station). I like the sense of old, how there’s no hassle to get on and off like there is with planes. I love the non-electronic signs they use to post times and platforms, where the letters and numbers turn and turn noisily until the right one is posted on the sign. I like having room on the train, the fact that I can move around, the scenery, and especially how I can feel the motion, unlike on a plane when you don’t feel like you’re moving at all.
Anyhow, it was a short trip to DC, where Frank picked me up and guided me through the subway back to his place. It was so good to see him again; he’s such a teddy bear, huggable and comforting. We had dinner and caught up, and back at his place I got him to watch the last half of Life is Beautiful with me despite his efforts to study. When he was showing me his movie collection, I shook my head at one after another as I didn’t recognize any of them. He said, “Yeah, these are black movies.” At the very end when I was thinking I probably wouldn’t watch anything, he showed me his last movie, Life is Beautiful, saying that he’d bought it because he saw that we’d had it in our room in college. But he never got through it because he didn’t want to read subtitles. So he wasn’t really watching as I was, but he got slowly sucked in and told me that he was choked up at the end. Haha.
Andrew drove from Virginia to meet me in DC, and I spent the rest of the weekend with him. We saw the World War II Memorial, and visited the other monuments in the National Mall since we were there, though we’d seen them before. It was interesting, to contrast the WWII Memorial to the Vietnam War Memorial, which is my favorite. We talked about how there is a different kind of loss that emanates from the Vietnam War Memorial and its veterans, how the Vietnam one focuses on lost lives. The whole memorial is just their names. Unlike the WWII one, which features quotes about the fight for liberty, and names of all the states and territories, and a whole host of other symbols and structures. It was much more elaborate and emphasized sacrifice in quite a different light.
After that we had dinner at the oldest restaurant in DC and got ready to celebrate Halloween. We didn’t have time or energy to get costumes, but we headed to a club his friend had recommended for a Halloween party. After realizing that we were the only people around those streets and clubs who was not black (whoa for being the minority among minorities), we decided to go to Georgetown instead. Which turned out to be a great decision. There were tons of people in costume, and the small streets were lined with bars and shops. It was a festive, cheery, fun atmosphere; it’s always invorigating when things seem to flow out of places into the open streets, back and forth. It was fun to dance with him again, and be silly as is our natural state. I got a bit more tipsy than I have been in a long time, and he took care of me well. It can be nice to let someone do that once in awhile.
The next day we went to DC’s tiny Chinatown, where a ten year old girl mixed me not-very-good bubble tea and he had not-so-good moon cakes. It was fun to see, though, and we always get so much from walking and observing together. Later in the afternoon I took the train (Washington Union Station in DC is also quite nice) to New Haven, where a med student (a recent Harvard alum) picked me up. Oddly enough, I could see myself there in that city that doesn’t get much credit. The mix of gritty and quaint reminded me of Cambridge.
How immensely happy I was to be back in Cambridge. There is no place I love more than Cambridge and the Square. Besides its concrete charms of people, quirks, nature, city, school, water, shops, food, subway, Adams...there is no place I've grown more. It's where I experienced my lowest lows and highest highs.
I got to Boston first, and felt at home when the skyline greeted me while driving through a small street in the dark. Then took that ever-familiar M2 shuttle ride from Longwood to the Square. I got off at the Adams-Lamont stop and walking by Westmorley Court, I was struck by the most incredible heart-choking sadness. The autumn was perfect and beautiful around me, crisp and sunny, and there I was in the midst of it, such a pathetic spectacle, a bundle of mess. To distract myself, I decided to look for our fern. I’d bought a fern from the plant sale at the beginning of senior year and hung it up in my room. Later I took it down and put it on my windowsill so that it would be easier to water, but it didn’t fare well. It was constantly shedding (like Gregor, remember girls?) and its typical coloring was a dry yellow, not the bright green that it had when I first got it. I thought I’d throw it away when I was moving out at the end of the year, but Andrew fought hard against this. He wanted to plant it somewhere and give it a chance. So we dug a hole in front of A-entry and plopped the fern there. We viewed it mostly as a false sense of hope, but when I was leaving for Cambridge during this trip, he asked me to look for it. So I did…and there it was: greener, fuller, and happier than it had ever been when I’d had it. Not only still there, but thriving. This erased all feelings of melancholy, and I felt the most sudden pang of happiness.
Later I ran into Lily and she said she thought of me every time she saw that fern, because she had seen us digging up dirt to plant it. At the time we were embarrassed that someone had witnessed our whimsy, but when she told me that, I was grateful. A part of me was still tangibly there. All of these things—they do still belong to me, perhaps even more so than to those who are still there. As I walked around and around along those brick sidewalks I am so tied to, along that river, around those buildings, near those stores, atop that grass—I knew I would still have all of this.
People are always trying to let go and move on at the same time, when really I need these to be distinct. Last June was so hurried, things built up so intensely atop of one another, there was no real time and space to say goodbye. He said that maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, that I wasn’t missing out on anything because this was the full experience: rushed, packed tight. I don’t regret it. But I am glad to have come back, after time and distance from it, to take the time to slowly bid farewell. And I think that’s how it was meant to happen, not right away, but after a little while and during a return.
