Recently, one of my best friends from back home – I’ll call her Liz – came to visit me at Duke. It was a last-minute decision on both our parts but nevertheless, I still spent the entirety of my Friday classes watching the clock and waiting impatiently for her bus to arrive at the East Campus stop.
I am lucky to say that I have made several close friends since arriving on campus, but once Liz came, it was like slipping into a favorite pair of shoes: I felt comfortable, confident, and wholly at ease in a way that I had not been for nearly a month. We giggled over inside jokes at dinner, huddled together on my bed and binge-watched movies like we did in high school (although it was much more uncomfortable on these twin-sized beds), and fell back into our old routine. I showed her around West Union and Shooters, but throughout the weekend, I began to feel a certain disconnect seeing her stand among my new friends, on a campus where I was beginning to build a life that, for the first time in almost four years, did not include her.
Duke is now my home. I had believed this to be a fact that I had processed and accepted long ago, but it did not truly hit me until Liz’s visit. Like most of my freshman peers, in some vague, backwaters portion of my mind, I was still treating college like an extended vacation from the comforts of familiarity. For me, it is a short drive down to the coast. For many others, it is a flight of thousands of miles – and maybe even half a world – away. Thus, I should not waste these next four years on trying to reconcile these two spheres of existence. Instead, familiarity must be shelved away like a photo album to reminisce over, and the unknown (surviving midterms, declaring a major, or even just Flunching that professor I admire) viewed not as challenges, but rather explorations.
Even though seeing my old friend was like putting salt on a still-fresh wound, I had already started carving out a new niche for myself to thrive in here at Duke. It is about time that I, and the class of 2022 as a whole, view the process of moving on not as a betrayal to our old selves, but rather a creation of new ones.