I’m spending some time at my undergraduate institution this weekend. Since I moved back to Virginia in 2007, I’ve lived close enough to visit the town and friends there several times a year, though in recent years my calendar and aging pets has made this a more complicated process than it used to be. I have managed to make it back for each of my five-year reunions, as it happens, and the fourth one of those is tomorrow.
Twenty years. How has it been twenty years? Twenty-one years since I lived in the dorm pictured above and ate in the basement cafeteria. The women’s dorm is now co-ed, I learned with some dismay at my fifteenth reunion. I guess that’s progress of some sort.
I don’t regret my life path to this point, but it wasn’t what I expected when I graduated from college. Some vague pencil marks of the outlines match up, such as getting my graduate degree in library science and continuing to work in higher education. The specifics of where and what, and the things that now fill my everyday — I don’t know if I could have even imagined them back then.
I haven’t done the best job of keeping in touch with my college friends. Casual connections at best, passively keeping up with their lives to the extent that they share them on Facebook. I’ll reconnect with a few tomorrow, probably, and as with years past it will be pleasant but also vaguely awkward, as we try to rekindle connections over twenty years old, and none of us are entirely who we were then.
I’m feeling a mix of things as I think about the next day or so (I’m driving over this evening) ahead of me. There’s a bit of FOMO with not having made firm plans to meet up. There’s a bit of jealousy that so many of my college friends seem to have ended up in the same places and can maintain the connections on a more regular basis. There’s a bit of nostalgia for a more innocent time in my life before adult responsibilities fully kicked in. There’s the ever present desire to be included while feeling like I’m on the outside looking in — not straight enough, not Mennonite enough.
Taking a deep breath and re-centering myself, I hope that regardless of what happens this weekend, I am able to be fully me in all the ways I can be now, and that will be enough. I hope that I am able to rekindle a bit of the connections that were essential to my collegiate successes, and that this will truly feel like a homecoming.
