When you first arrive at college, there’s a sense that it’s someone else’s college. It’s uncomfortable, being let into someone else’s space, the lives they’ve developed here. You look at the juniors and seniors, pinning your vision of what you could become on what they are. You see their lives, and you can only hope yours someday looks like that, too.
I’m here to tell you that they all had that same feeling the first day they stepped on campus, with different juniors and seniors, and those before them. You look to those who belong and have ownership over the campus for cues on what cut of jeans are in style, where to sit in the MP or where it’s not appropriate to throw a frisbee.
For me, quickly intertwined with a senior boy with a quaint little bedroom in a guest house blocks from school, it was even more intense. As I watched him write his comps late at night in the library and became closer with the pretty senior girls that lived in the front house, my hopes grew.
It was always their house, and though I spent far more time there than in my Chilcott bedroom that year, I still never really belonged there. It’s like I watched someone else live the life I was going to have, but I couldn’t have it yet, and it wasn’t really mine at all. I stopped following someone around while they lived their life and created my own life.
And a year later, I moved into the very same house.
I’d lost almost all connection with the front house girls once they moved out in May, beyond asking them for advice on which room to pick before signing my own lease. And a few months after moving in, I lost connection with my boy in the back house, too.
The first week after moving in was spent sifting through drawers and hall closets. They were filled with graduation party decorations from the girls’ party I attended a year before, the same plastic mistletoe that was hung at their Christmas pajama party, a set of abandoned crutches and leftover birthday wrapping paper.
The mailman brought us mail for girls I’ve never met — somewhere in some system this is still their house. Letters from the college arrive with their class year listed, some names followed by a ’13 or ’16. On the doorframe between the kitchen and the living room, a single height from a former men’s basketball player is marked in blue pen.
I am now one of ‘the front house girls’ I looked up to in my first year of college. I walk the same sidewalk up Alumni, brushing away the same overgrown grass and smiling at the same neighbors leaving for work.
The difference is it’s filled with my own friends, girls I met outside the orientation bouncy house or at a sunny February baseball game. They’re my own memories of my own life, not someone else’s.
My life became 3 p.m. mimosas on the porch swing, heart-shaped pancakes and tying each other’s togas. It’s the kind of experience that, in high school or on those first days on campus, you dream about. I wake up every morning and go downstairs to find girls scrambling eggs and pulling espresso, come home from class to backflips off the couch and fresh roses on the kitchen table.
We’ve cut out a million Valentine’s hearts, carved a Thanksgiving ham, swapped dresses for formals. If I’m lucky, sometimes I come home to fresh baked cookies or midnight microwave popcorn. On Saturday nights, five different songs blast from our respective rooms upstairs, meeting in the middle for fashion shows and dancing. We gathered around the TV for election night (and cried), the Dancing with the Stars finale and ritualized Sunday night White Lotus watch parties.
Often, I think of the girl in her double employee housing room in Telluride, opening her acceptance letter to Occidental and how much this would make her smile.
In ways, this house has changed with the girls that live here, like the paintings we made to hang on our wall and kitschy mugs we added to the existing collection. But in others, this house stays the same — it’s the same porch swing that I sat on, eating an Angel’s burrito before my boyfriend graduated college, as the one I sit on by myself to write my final piece for the newspaper.
This place became our home, even if it was just for a year.
While most people probably won’t spend their first year of college surrounded by seniors in an off-campus house that they’ll move into a year later, the house is intertwined with the college. It’ll feel the same in the Green Bean or on your favorite bench on the quad. Where you once felt like you didn’t quite belong, before you know it, will be part of your home.
Now, I pass this house, and this college, to the next girls.
Contact Mollie Barnes at mbarnes@oxy.edu
