A couple Septembers ago I sat in Newark Airport waiting for my flight to Ireland. I had decided to spend my entire junior year abroad because I was sick to shit of Duke. I was sick of how my friends got drunk and did nothing every weekend, how we talked in Seinfeld and Zoolander quotes, rather than about anything that might be remotely important to any of us. I was angry that I worked all the time but still never seemed to have room for a weekend, or even a day free from it—you might call me a workaholic. I was disgusted with the spill of beer and the often-empty dance floors of West Campus frat parties. The sound or sight of Duke’s oh-so precious nickname, the “Gothic Wonderland,” was gaining in its power to nauseate me. I even looked cynically upon the neo-Gothic architecture, thinking how it only wanted to be. My plan wasn’t to just leave, it was to get the fuck out.
My first day at Duke Recycles, I walked up the driveway to the warehouse, past puddles that swam with sky and gusts of wind that blew my knot of hair into strings. My view opened up past the edge of the brick building and there materialized Jed and Jason, leaning up against the boxy blue truck - grinning, windswept, gorgeous and waiting for me.
But a few weeks before I left for Ireland, I started to see how I was missing my friends, the people who would always mean college to me. I didn’t really know them that well, I knew that: we weren’t a very open crowd. Still, they could make me perfectly happy to be in a car with windows that wouldn’t roll down, air-conditioning that wouldn’t come on, packed in at 90 degrees and inching towards Ninth Street. If I’m going to be sentimental, and I guess that I am, I suppose I’ll say that the company was so good I forgot my claustrophobia.
So as I sat between the unreal, wakeful glare of fluorescents and the smooth plane of the blue airport windows, I looked across my aisle and saw a girl with an orange ribbon on her bookbag. My study abroad group was told to tie orange ribbons to our traveling gear so we could recognize each other. She was reading The Hours. I did not say hello to her. I was not ready to leave yet.
The snowstorms during my sophomore year shut everything down. My friends and I borrowed trays from the Great Hall and went sledding on the Washington Duke golf course, which we followed with the hotel’s desserts and hot chocolate. That was the first time I’d been sledding.
An older man clambered through the dim buzz of the airport crowd toward the seat across from me. He had thin gray hair that stuck up enthusiastically, thick glasses and ecstatic eyes. A younger man, presumably his son, followed him with a portion of their bags. The old man took the seat across from me and, grinningly, he turned to me and said in the first Irish accent I ever heard, “Can I use your knees?”
“What?” I heard him, I just couldn’t believe that anyone would say that.
“Can I use your knees?” With a grin like an elevator ding. He not only said it, he repeated it. And enthusiastically, even better.
Thursday night is Indian food night. A spot of lurid pink in the brown, brown, tan of on-campus food. Whenever I go to dinner with my friends, we stay and we set for as long as we can without too much work-induced guilt or being kicked out. At The Loop, we are always those people who we complain about clogging up the booths forever, needlessly talking over cleared tables.
I swam through the yellow airport lights and the slow-motion thudding of people who are waiting at night to go anywhere. I watched bags for the man with the enthusiastic hair. He came back. I stood up and blurred by the man whose bags I watched—along with my own bags, a paranoid American. My flight was called.
I look at Duke now and I see how beautiful it is through something of moony nostalgia and something of genuine appreciation. My identity as a college student was made here. I did stupid and meaningful stuff with my friends here. I sat at night with the Chapel pew groaning gratefully beneath me and I looked up into the fading high vaults here, neck back gratefully.
Silent and tired, I flew toward the magic and the mystery of Shannon Airport’s nonexistent customs. Something to Declare. Nothing to Declare. Signs and blank walls with no one there to separate you from importing all your worldly possessions to the space just past the waiting crowd.
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