SU: Day 2
June 28, 2005 @ 9:25 a.m.

I AM AT SUSQUEHANNA!!!

I've been wondering why I was so nervous. Really, this is awesome. Besides the itchy blankets... and the cold, tiled dorm floor... and the evil showers... and having to walk across campus for every meal, this is pretty damn cool.

Yesterday before dinner I realized that it feels like I've been here ages but it had only been about 24 hours. Speaking of dinner, the food's better than expected. Not quite as appetizing as Chris made it sound, but strangely filling.

I had my first two workshops yesterday. The first was three hours long, and Tom Bailey (our professor, who is so unlike any teacher I've ever met that it's just amazing) went over two stories... Bullet in the Brain and The A & P and we discussed how character details made them seem more real. Then he assigned us to write one paragraph about a character entering a room, which I did:

Incense and cigarette smoke burned my nose, wafting around me so tangibly I could nearly see it as colored swirls before me. It wasn’t a nice scent by any means, but it wasn’t terrible either; just one of in-between, not quite good, not quite bad, not quite, not quite. I was only two steps inside the double doors, propped open by aging wooden wedges, and already I felt a small amount of anxiety in my gut telling me turn around, turn around, they don’t want you here. I could feel the pulse of the band – the strum of a bass guitar, the beating of a drum – under my feet, which unexpected might’ve thrown one off-balance with its intensity. Voices blurred together over the music, laughing and whispering and idle chat, none directed my way; I looked at my feet and walked further into the nightclub.

Then we went back after lunch for a session that ended up being two hours and fifteen minutes, and he workshopped a few... I kinda fell asleep by the end.... >_< But he then assigned us to read three short stories in his book (which he made us buy, and it wasn't cheap... $30 or something... grr) and write our own short story. A lot for a night. Is that how much you're normally assigned per class in college? I mean... eeep. Especially since the dorm rooms are loud. But I did it, and wrote my short story.

--- Belonging ---

Where do you belong?
This was the question that plagued me as I grew up between my mother and father. Not What are you going to be when you grow up? – another equally-unanswered question – but this one, concise and always wondered about in an uneasy way. There really was no answer to it that I could see, and continuing to question it the way I did only made me feel even more upset about it – less upset than disappointed, I suppose, because it was a simple lingering feeling of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. And on days like today, when I sat on itchy hay bales on the edge of the field next to my mother’s modest cottage, I spent many an evening questioning myself as I stared up at the painted cerulean sky.
It was almost dusk that night, and I had swept my golden hair into a frizzy sort of ponytail, ready to fall apart; I impatiently brushed rogue wisps of it behind my ears before stretching out on the uppermost layer of the bundled hay, watching clouds lazily drift across the sky. Where do you belong? I watched a pair of cowbirds soar above me, swooping around tree branches, effortlessly managing to avoid colliding with the boughs. Watching it almost made me wish to try their shoes – or wings, as it would be – on for one day, to see what it would be like, gliding high above the land below, no worries besides the ever-present search for something edible.
The pair of tan-colored birds lost in the coming dusk, again I focused on the sky, imagining the clouds to be like the down beneath their feathers, soft and almost creamy, soothing between two fingers.
Perhaps it is wrong to say that The Question had plagued me all the time I’d grown up here. No, this internal torment had begun only last autumn, when my father had first invited me to live with him in the city. I had always gone to school here, riding the bus forty minutes to get to the small school where I already knew all my peers; on weekends I would take the train north to my father in the city, and would pass my days on sidewalks and in the library. Had I really ever liked the insane speed at which every moment passed in New York City? But at the same time, everything was within a fifteen minute walk, a five minute taxi ride. Always there, always within reach, the readiness of it all a comfort to me. Here, the only things for miles were hills; hills and fields and the occasional windbreak of trees, the occasional grazing horse or cow. And here I was, still indecisive, and summer was coming too quickly.
When I took the train, be it to or from my father’s city, I liked to sit in the stuffy silence of the usually empty compartment and read, the patched blinds drawn shut. By the end of the ride I would emerge into a totally different world; my mother’s cottage on lazy, rolling hills contrasting so much with the hustle and bustle of city life that sometimes it made me wonder: did I really belong in either one?
The sky was now lit a dying pinky-purple on the horizon above the tree line, and the exotic way the silhouetted trees looked drove my memories back to vacations in New Jersey, Florida, Virginia. The word vacation echoed in my mind, calling forth images of dusty beaches and crowds of people coming, going, wandering; and it was then that images of the city joined them. I realized with a start that my father’s city seemed more like a vacation than a home.
I sat up, still dizzied by this epiphany, and took in the neat rows of corn, three feet high before me, full of vibrant spring green. Behind me were rolling hills, and in the distance I could see the apex of the shed roof beside my mother’s house, with a rooster-shaped wind charm that had used to turn to point the direction of the wind. It had long since rusted over, the arrow frozen in time, indicating my mother’s house, and I knew I’d found my answer.

---

Yeah, let me know if you like it, hopefully it will be one of the chosen four for workshops this morning!

-Adrienne

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