I fly home in two weeks.
I was out with a friend of mine for lunch a few days ago. She's a California girl from Camarillo, a town about half an hour south of Santa Barbara. California kids make up the largest portion of out-of-state students at the University of Arizona. I asked her whether or not Tucson felt all that different to her from home. She told me no, and that makes sense. Aside from the underlying Hispanic culture that's prevalent thanks to Tucson's proximity to the Mexican border and the absence of an ocean, Tucson is west coast material. Don't get me wrong--this campus is nowhere near as lush as USC, and since there's a cactus no matter where you go it's impossible to forget you're in the desert. But still, it's a whole lot of palm trees and sunshine, and those are the first two things that come to mind when I think "west coast."
It's an entirely different story for me, coming from New England. This is another world for me. For one, weather here is predictable. Forecast for Tucson tomorrow: sunny. Forecast for New England tomorrow: your guess is as good as mine. It could start off cloudy in the morning, brighten up in the early afternoon, then cloud over again and rain in the evening. Or snow. Or both. Or, hell, it could do all those things in reverse order.
New England has four seasons: summer, fall, winter, and spring (although there's not necessarily a clear distinction of when one season ends and another begins). Tucson has two: summer and non-summer. Summer will see temperatures in the upper nineties for four months with a monsoon season at the end bringing plenty of rainfall. Non-summer consists of more modest temperatures in the seventies and eighties. There will be a brief three week intermission during non-summer where a kind of "winter" will take place. During these three weeks, with rare exception, the temperature will be in the forties and fifties instead of the seventies and eighties.
During the latter parts of April Tucson slowly begins sliding from non-summer into summer. Slowly. If it wasn't for the slight discomfort that comes from the warmer weather, however, you couldn't tell April from February here. The passage of time is unobtrusive.
New England is finally starting to have some spring after a winter that hit late and lingered longer than people expected (or wanted) it to. I'm hoping to come home to at least a few weeks of New England spring before summer heat and humidity start making daily existence painful.
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When I was in high school and thinking about where I wanted to go to college, my only thought was going as far away as possible (without leaving the continental US). Many people criticized my pessimism and disdain for high school in my first book, but honestly, if I had written it any differently I would've been lying. High school was painful for me in many ways, and all I wanted to do was get away from it. My college plan was an escape plan. I wanted to escape and make a new life for myself some place else, and I set out to do just that.
The closer I came to graduating high school the more I was scared of actually having to make this new life for myself--especially during the last few months before I left, when I finally got around to putting together some semblance of a life I enjoyed. In American culture we often portray going away to college as the ultimate freedom, and while it certainly is, it's also perfect insanity. Leave all your friends and family behind, go off to where nothing to you is familiar, and only take with you as much stuff as you can fit into a car (or in my case, a few suitcases). Leading up to your departure all sorts of people ask you, "Are you excited to be going to college?" and the prospective college student dutifully answers, "Yes" because that's the expected answer, the traditional answer, the answer that fits well into polite conversation. Really though, even if we are excited, we're also terrified. And why not? It's nothing short of madness.
The first couple months I was in Tucson I asked myself the same question on a fairly regular basis: "What the hell am I doing here?" This brilliant plan I had of disappearing to the opposite end of the country was suddenly full of holes. I questioned whether I had made the right decision to go this far out. Adjusting to the new environment took a lot out of me. I don't know if I expected it to be easy to build a new life from scratch, but I know I wasn't expecting leaving the old one to be so hard.
I did it though. I made new friends, and an interesting crew at that: an eccentric from Flagstaff, a writer and artist from California, a movie buff druggie from Texas, and the only other person at the UofA from Connecticut. An eclectic group of kids. I couldn't ask for better compatriots ("normal" people bore me). I adopted Tucson, for all its finer points and its drawbacks, started thinking of it as a city I could call "home" for the better part of the year.
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When I went home for the first time after my sojourn in Tucson, I discovered that my parents had painted my room orange. They say it's "copper" but it only appears to be "copper" in natural sunlight. It's a complete turn-around from what it use to be--sky blue. It had been cleaned out, which was nice because there was a lot of extra crap in there that only got in the way. I also received a complimentary bed-side chair, the kind you might get at a swanky hotel room. I half expected to open the nightstand drawer and find a copy of Gideon's Bible and the Book of Mormon. While the furniture hadn't been changed or rearranged, it didn't feel like the room I had lived in since I was a kid, the room I had left behind when I went to school last August.
Going home disoriented me. I've discovered that I don't transition well from college to home and vice versa. The two are different in so many ways that it requires what I can only describe as a mental shift to acclimate myself to whichever one I'm in. I don't like going home for short amounts of time because of it. I wind up having just enough time to adjust to being home, only to leave and having to readjust to being at school again. If I don't have much time to be at home it's easier for me to stay in Tucson. That's why I decided to remain here over spring break.
Flying back and forth across the country also gets old fast. These days I'm trying to find ways to do that as little as possible.
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Whichever world I'm in, the other feels almost fictitious.
You stay here for eight months (minus the four weeks I was in Terryville for the holidays) and it begins to feel normal. One day is the same as the last, and one week follows all the other weeks before it. You live long enough in one place doing the same routine over and over again and it starts to feel like that's the way it's always been, and the life you had before college recedes into the back of your mind.
Memories of your hometown don't fade completely, of course. You know it's still out there. You know you're going back to it eventually. It's just not at the fore-front of your mind. I sometimes have dreams where I'm sleeping in my bed in my room in my old house but wake up in Tucson. "It was just a dream," I tell myself. Just a dream about the way things use to be but aren't anymore.
The same thing happens when I'm home again. I fly into Hartford late at night, exhausted, come home and crawl into bed. When I wake up the next morning everything is how it use to be. I'm in my bed again. The sunlight drifts in through the east-facing windows. The room is copper, but it's still recognizably my room, and everything is in its proper place. The only evidence of my absence are my suitcases tucked away in the far corner, still packed with clothes. I think about Tucson and my college experiences with my college friends and it all seems like a dream. A strange, crazy, wonderful dream.
I get nervous about leaving one world for the next. Whichever one I'm in quickly becomes comfortable, and I don't want to have to make the transition again. I would like to say that I want to stick with one or the other, but I would never want to choose between the two. I can't. I have to go back and forth.
I'm also nervous because the two worlds aren't balanced. I spend a third of the year in Terryville and the rest in Tucson. Now that I'm about to embark on the one third that I'll be spending in Terryville, how strange is it going to be to spend that much time at home? How hard will it be to go back to Tucson after staying there for that long? Will one eventually (perhaps, inevitably) feel more real to me than the other?
I'm afraid to find out, but I'm fast approaching the moment of truth. I fly home in two weeks.