After Vassar, 600 or so 21-year-olds sit, spread over thousands of miles, wondering what the fuck just happened. College is bizarre. The price of an education is a front for what it costs to step out of time, to freeze it, or maybe just to tweak the part of your brain that minds its passage. You look older, and so do I, but where did the time go, and why do I miss you?
I'm lucky, because my very favorite piece of Vassar packed up his stuff and came with me to Rochester. So there are two of us sitting in a room, wondering what the fuck just happened. I don't know who he's missing. But there's someone I used to eat lunch with at my desk in the art gallery every Tuesday. And there's someone who used to beg me to climb out and sit with him on this huge fallen tree limb over the gorge by his town house. There's the person who bought me my very first Starbucks coffee and the one who used to run around in a Gumby costume. And, hot damn, I miss them. You can call and email and type out pithy Facebook posts till the world ends, but it's an abstraction of what's over.
This is why I'm getting a PhD. More time-freezing. Sort of.
