The week before starting college, my three best friends and I drove to the beach. We unpacked our snacks, planted ourselves in lounge chairs and didn’t move for hours, reveling in each other’s company. In the distinctive, soon-to-be fleeting, feeling of belonging. We drove home in unison with the sun setting – an ending that felt like the final page of a chapter. The last surging day when you still feel defined by your life at home, wherever home is for you.
Just through the process of being on our own, we all redefine ourselves in college. In that beginning stretch, we feel suspended—between friends, between homes, between whatever new version of ourselves we are becoming. Yet we inevitably grow into familiarity, allowing Bowdoin to earn its title as a home. And, with a home, comes visitors.
If your friends are like mine, the first time they visit, they’ll notice the moose signs flanking the highway. You feel a certain pride as you walk them through the quad, giddy when you get to share a silly story about one of the numerous passersby you encounter (it’s Bowdoin – these run-ins are bound to happen).
For a weekend, your two homes meet: your hometown and Bowdoin friends join and bond over you and the shared experience of college. Your hometown friends trek (though not in Bean Boots) along with you to a social house party and are awestruck by the relative smallness of campus. They eat brunch with you the next day and you all share stories about the previous night’s shenanigans. Perhaps you show them around campus, giving them a tour of the wonderous place you now call home. Or perhaps it snows (unsurprisingly) and you all camp out in your room, eating snacks with silverware from Thorne.
In these brief visits, we feel the “Bowdoin Bubble” being prodded. We each have a life away from Bowdoin, proved through pictures on bedroom walls, stories of home told over the dinner table, and the occasional high school sweatshirt. These lives, old versions of ourselves, slightly disconnect us from our relationships with people at Bowdoin, just as the college versions of our high school friends are somewhat alienating.
There are nights when you want to call up your friends and teleport them into your dorm room. There are times when you hear their stories and feel a pang that you’re not there. That for once, you’re not all experiencing everything together.
Yet isn’t this the point of college—to create your own experience? These friendships, new and old, are built for storytelling. For the intimacy of sharing stories about the person you used to be and the person you are becoming. With these visits from friends — welcome interruptions of daily life at Bowdoin — we come to see physical evidence of our changing lives and selves. We come to feel the potential, even if only for a weekend, for our two worlds to coexist and, better yet, for these worlds to expand.