I have just entered my third year of university, and the idea of saying goodbye hits me like a faint stab in the chest every now and then. I know I have two years left. But I also know that two years are already gone. I don’t want to live in nostalgia but I do feel like it is important to honour it, even if it is this anticipatory. I hope this helps be more appreciative of the little things. I hope these are the things I carry with me as I apply to Masters’ programs and sit for placements. I hope this helps me remember who I am and what I care about and what my life at university looked like. I hope I never forget.
- The coffee. The way I was always smiled at when handed it. The way my order was known. The way that, regardless of the way I was feeling or the mess I had managed to get myself into that day, in this space I could just be the girl who likes hot mochas a little too much. There is something special about Fuelzone, something it has that you don’t expect to find in the coffee cafe of your university. It just feels kinder than you would expect. I do not have to think much about how I exist in Fuelzone, I can just be there and sip on my coffee. I can laugh loudly or say something oddly depressing or make a weird offhand comment and the space will not react to it. It feels very insulated, very safe. Nothing can beat the warmth and comfort of the cup of Bournvita that my mom used to make me at home, but my daily Fuelzone order comes pretty close.
- The walks. The way we always take the long route, even if it takes longer. The way that we would waste time, so so much time. And yet we never lost any. At what other time will I ever get to talk about purple flowers with you? When else are we going to get to be twenty year olds laughing about god knows what, sitting underneath the most perfect orange sun? When else am I going to get to tell you to text me when you get home safe with the knowledge that you live eight minutes away? I could hear you complain about the heat a 1000 more times as long as you keep laughing at my jokes. I will make you a paper fan, I will come up with funnier, better jokes, I will get us a constant supply of food and your favourite cold drink. Let’s just sit here for a little while longer. Let me drop you back home even if it’s convenient. It is not a burden.
- The freedom. The absolute joy of being able to go for a walk at 2:30 AM just because, the rush of excitement at getting to pick what I want to eat for all my meals, the comfort of decorating my room with a 1000 pictures of the band I love. I find some sick joy in pretending like I am a grown-up, in telling my parents that I am really busy and had too many meetings today. I like to think I am doing some important work here. I like to think the things I am learning are putting together small puzzle pieces in my brain that will one day unlock the puzzle that helps me do good in the world. Maybe I really am doing important things here, maybe I really am not and am getting too caught up in things that won’t matter in two years. But this place inspires me to do good, to do better, to always be better.
- The familiarity. You know exactly which coffee we will go and get after class. I know that you will wait back and we will talk about how the meeting went after it ends. We know the music we are going to listen to on the way back to our rooms, we know exactly what you are going to eat for lunch tomorrow. It is all so mundane and it is all so within-this-bubble, but it is so important. I didn’t come here expecting to find home. But I know you better than I know most things — I know when you do your laundry, I know how you are when you are sad, I can tell when you really need to pee. After 2 years, where does this knowledge go? What do I do with it? How do I stop myself from ordering your favourite coffee by mistake, from saying your name whenever I hear a song from the singer you really like? I don’t know, I don’t know. But you are here now and we have enough time left, and I am going to put this knowledge to good use, not in the way it is actually useful but in the way that I can feel happy at us having reached the level of friendship where I know your shampoo.
- The people. Not just the friends I have found, but even the people I haven’t spoken properly to since my first semester but will still wave hello to if I see them around. I know I don’t think about it too much right now. I know I take you smiling back at me in the line at the mess for granted. But I know I will miss this. I will miss having people I know in every corner of this campus, I will miss the happy pauses of waving and smiling that used to punctuate my otherwise heavy day. I won’t see you ever again in less than two years. I don’t even know if I will get to say goodbye to you, tell you how much all the smiling and waving meant. It is the people, more than anything else, who have made this place what it is. Not just the friends who know the whole of me, but also the ones I only know in bits and pieces — the familiar faces in the library, the classmates I sat beside once and never again, the people whose names I don’t remember but whose presence softened the edges of my day. I will miss the easy comfort of being surrounded by so many lives intertwined with mine, even if only at the margins. I will miss the web of small connections that held up my life here, without me even realizing it.
And maybe that is what I am really trying to hold on to — not the grand gestures or the academic milestones, but all the everyday stuff. The routines I crafted in this place, the ways I came to know it. I know I will ache for these moments when they are no longer mine to live, when all I see it through are the Instagram stories of Ashokans I won’t know. But I also know that memory has a way of keeping them alive, of letting me carry them into the life I have yet to build. I will take the warmth of a smile in the mess line into rooms full of strangers, the freedom of midnight walks into cities I do not yet know, the joy of waving at soon-to-be-friends into the universities and offices and places I end up in. I have found a life here. I will carry it with me into my larger life, wherever I end up. Maybe I won’t miss this place because, in some ways, I will always be in it.