I lost my apartment key yesterday, less than 24 hours after picking it up from the Residence Life and Housing Services office on Central Campus. That number is pretty consistent with my past record. I remained keyless for most of my freshman and sophomore years, by the logic of, “I’m going to lose them again anyway.”
I didn’t lose my keys all semester in Barcelona despite an increase in recklessness—allowed for by classes no more difficult than middle school—thus proving my theory that Duke is a black hole.
I’ve explained to inquiring friends that my anxiety over returning to college stemmed from the pressures of having to become a “real person” again, meaning really responsible, but now that I’m back I’m reminded that most of my classmates are not on their seventeenth Duke card.
“Not as bad as I expected” is an easy enough assessment of the transition back to the U.S. Yes, I hate grocery shopping in this country. But the nuisance of the drinking age is easily overcome on college campuses and what fake IDs are good for.
I suppose it helps that I landed on the crash pad of San Diego for a four-week rehab stint and was immediately embraced by warm weather, Mexican food and adoring friends at every corner to satiate my hunger for storytelling and physical closeness.
In San Diego, I started drawing designs for a tattoo I want. It’s going to symbolically incorporate elements of an idea I lifted from a Duke professor, the equation for the “good life”: doing the things I love, in the place I love, with the people I love.
There are three places I considered that evoke a sense of home in distinct ways: San Diego, where I grew up, Costa Rica, where I spent the past summer and Barcelona, where I “studied.” The first location gives me roots, the second an ideal of escape and the third a future—I’d like to return to Barcelona to live on a more permanent basis. I’d like to reunite with old lovers, old friends, familiar street performers, the mindless routine of the morning metro commute, my favorite bars and delis, the feeling of safety among strangers.
But where do Duke and Durham fit into that equation? I repeated to friends that I was looking forward to coming back to the city more than the school, which is actually untrue. The Triangle is more inviting than ever, and I can no longer list the places I enjoy on one hand: Watts Grocery, Parker and Otis, the Regulator, the Cat’s Cradle, Vespa, Francesca’s, the Pinhook, etc. But like before, I live out my student life on a campus.
A major difference is that I now live among ugly brown domiciles instead of Gothic towers. But the building aesthetics haven’t colored the emotional tone of my return, which has been full of delightful reminders of what this experience has been comprised of:
Every time I leave Central and land on West, its beauty overwhelms me. Entering a new class with first day of school jitters, wrapped up in new admiration for an inspiring professor and a challenging syllabus to parse. Leaving my advisor’s office with a sense of total peace of mind and affirmation that I imagine is similar to that of having really exceptional parents to talk to. People-watching in Joe Van Gogh, and interacting with whatever quirky new staff they’ve hired. Falling asleep on the back room couches of the Gothic Book Store. Ogling Law School students outside the Refectory, and making fun of Divinity School students outside the other Refectory.
The feeling of school pride is new and hard-won. I came close to transferring after my first year, and I’ve always been tepid in the amount of praise I’d admit of Duke. But these, the mundane pleasures I’ve missed, make it pretty evident that I’m treating this place like home, and no longer a destination for collegiate tourism, the yin-yang of binge drinking and Perkins panic attacks. Even the sex has been delightfully familiar, nothing at all as vitriolic as the mythologized Karen Owens dynamic.
In fact, my pride in Duke seems to correlate oppositely to its portrayal in the media. It’s not contrarianism, but something closer to the small thrill I get when people spout misinformation in earnest. It’s more fun to keep the truth—one of safe, ordinary happiness—unspoken than correct them.
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