This is one of the first pieces I wrote in grad school, and remains one of the most personal. I wrote this for Contemporary Nonfiction, still one of my favorite classes.
As we emerged from the dimly-lit and mysteriously-puddled T station, I smelled an instantly familiar mixture of Dunkin Donuts coffee, sea-salt air, and historical significance. After traversing the dozens of stairs in the sprawling square of Government Center, Alex grabbed my hand.
“Feel good to be back?” he asked, squinting genially in the midday sun. I inhaled deeply through my nose, and forcefully exhaled, just as I had learned in yoga class.
I had started off college in Boston like so many other 18-year-olds: wide-eyed, enthusiastic, and privately terrified. I didn’t know a soul and was somehow left out of the immediate clique-forming ritual that seems to happen every year at Boston University within the first two weeks of matriculation. This was partially due to the fact that I had somehow been assigned to a single room that I am still convinced was actually a closet (I had to walk through my sophomore suitemates’ spacious double room to get to our shared bathroom) on an otherwise freshmen-less floor at the east end of campus, far removed from the bonding occurring at the “woo hoo no parents!” keggers of the frosh-heavy dorms half a mile west of me.
I also managed to debunk the Disney-flavored myth that you can achieve anything through hard work and perseverance. After doing well in math and science in high school and given my interest in medicine (and efficiency!), I had come to Boston to pursue what I believed to be the perfect major – biomedical engineering. The magnitude of this miscalculation was so large as to be almost comical; I tried harder and studied more than in my previous thirteen years of formal education combined, and even that was not enough to help me pass Electromagnetic Physics for Engineers or Linear Algebra. I lost my half-tuition scholarship, a large chunk of my dignity, and all passion for the mechanical aspects of things. After three semesters of trying to convince myself that it would get easier, that it was worth it, that I would not quit, my sanity finally triumphed over my stubbornness, and I decided to give up on engineering and on Boston University. This decision was made easier by the fact that the Office of Financial Assistance had even less faith in my academic abilities than I did, and finally yanked my scholarship after two semesters of sending vaguely threatening letters. Without it I couldn’t afford to stay at BU, even in another major, so I transferred back to my state school, the University of Maryland. I switched my focus of study to something science-related that involved absolutely no physics: neurophysiology. Now, for the first time in four years, I was back in Boston thanks to a Christmas gift from my well-meaning boyfriend.
Showing off the downtown area to Alex was a cinch. I had always loved the city, the seemingly haphazard but ultimately beautiful architectural juxtaposition of old and new, the ornate brownstones, the caliginous concrete subway stations (“it feels like the Bat Cave in here,” Alex had marveled). He repeatedly had to drag me back in step with him as I kept bounding ahead with excitement, proudly exhibiting the city that was the first home I had ever chosen.
But as we walked west along the quiet brick sidewalks of Beacon Street towards my alma nada, I felt my steps get heavier. The border between my affection for Boston and my disdain for it was drawn through Kenmore Square, the eastern boundary of the Boston University campus. I stared up at the famous neon Citgo sign, mere feet from my freshman dormitory, and felt a nostalgia-tinged mixture of sadness and regret. As we passed by various school buildings on my tour of disappointment, I identified them by the torturous classes they housed: the cold stone building on Cummington Street where I used to study in vain for Differential Equations; the windowless basement that served as my Systems and Circuits classroom and smelled of mold and mental anguish; the cavernous Metcalf Center where bendy straws and paper clips lost all their whimsy when I was assigned to build a load-bearing bridge out of them in Mechanics 210 (mine collapsed under the pressure of the air escaping my professor’s lips as he laughed at my, uh, inventive design).
I provided the commentary for our tour with just a hint of strain in my laughter, unconsciously stealing glances at Alex as I talked, looking for something. After two years together and one sharing an apartment, I wasn’t too worried that this trip would reveal a side of me he didn’t like – I had already shown him plenty of those. Then what was I looking for? Sympathy? Comfort? An eye to catch and have an I know, right. Me! Total catastrophe! ha-ha moment that would somehow transform it all from pathetic into hilarious? I wasn’t sure.
I had met Alex during my last semester of college, when I was at the polar opposite of my forlorn days in Boston. At Maryland, I had found the academic and social success that had so painfully eluded me at BU. I had established a good group of friends, and with my hard work finally being channeled into classes that were actually comprehensible to me, both my grades and self-confidence had gotten a considerable boost. I had disclosed to him some anecdotes about my time in Boston, but mostly in reference to my appreciation for the city itself; a self-preservation instinct compelled me to keep the details of my previous loserdom under wraps. As close as our relationship had brought us, I wasn’t sure that I was prepared to let him to see me in all my sad-sack, piteous splendor. It had been almost unbearable to see myself that way.
I had grown up like many children of my generation whose parents were hyper-focused on self-esteem; for fear of any of us developing a complex, we were praised and rewarded for even the most underwhelming achievements. Instead of just the champions, every player in my soccer league received a trophy, ostensibly an award for donning the uniform correctly. I had never truly failed at anything (or at least never felt like I had), so my complete academic and social failure at BU not only hurt, but caught me off-guard. It was like getting hit by an unexpected wave at the beach, feeling the physical pain of its thumping force but also detecting something intentional in it, something personal that compounded the pain with an inexplicable sense of betrayal. I had taken a leap in leaving behind my whole life in Maryland to go to BU, and all I got in return for my bravery was the occasional “+” after a “D” and a stress-eating habit.
We passed by the Photonics Center and I told Alex about the time I had spent there, where I often spaced out of my 8 AM Fluid Dynamics class into a daydream in which I was thrown down the steep stairs of the lecture auditorium, landing in a defeated pile at the feet of the professor, who would immediately realize the agony his class was causing me and declare me exempt from further exams. I excused myself to run to the restroom while Alex smoked a cigarette outside.
As I walked into the silent chrome room, a wave crested over me. I had neglected to tell Alex that this bathroom was the place where I came to cry if I couldn’t make it back to my dorm room in time to lament a particularly soul-crushing class. It had almost always been empty (spotting a girl in the Photonics Center was rare), so I was able to bawl in peace. I heard the shhk of the automatic air freshener spritzing the room with its lavender scent and recalled the day I got a C- on an essay in Modern American Literature (which at the time was the only class I wasn’t bombing) and had been able to determine that the timed sprays were separated by exactly eighteen minutes.
I don’t know what I had expected to feel when I got in there; probably the same feeling I had been preparing to return to the entire trip, what I felt the countless hours that I spent huddled in one of these stalls, stifling my whimpers with a snotty sleeve: the dull, gnawing pain of monotonous failure. Bracing myself, I waited for it, almost visibly flinching in anticipation of its venomous strike.
But it never came. I didn’t feel it in the bathroom, just as I hadn’t felt it walking down Commonwealth Avenue through the ghosts of academic probation past. I hadn’t even felt it peeking in on my sophomore dorm, where I spent most of my last semester in Boston trying to sleep away my misery while the whiteboard hanging on the other side of the door wallowed in friendless neglect and my textbooks scowled at me in exasperation from their scattered positions all over the floor. Actually, the most salient emotion I detected was relief. It was surprisingly cathartic to stand here and narrate (with visual aids!) to Alex my various failings and shameful shortcomings. Rather than acting disappointed or turned off, he merely nodded, laughed, or commented on the architecture of the buildings. In a way, Alex’s blasé attitude towards my disastrous past made it much more bearable to me, who back at twenty years old had been convinced that not hacking it at BU was the end of the world. My failure was like a spider. “Oh my god!” I had screamed at it. “It’s so huge and awful and scary!” Alex had come along, given an unimpressed shrug and a little chuckle at my hysteria, and squashed it dead, leaving me to blush about how silly my disproportionate terror had been.
As I exited my sarcophagus of self-pity, I realized that for the first time ever, I was leaving this building with a smile on my face. Alex was waiting for me when I got outside, genteelly offering up his bent arm, his smiling gaze as steady as ever.
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