In May, everything will change. I’ll be leaving the place I’ve called home for the last three years, packing my world into boxes again. There’s a certain nostalgia to it — resurrecting bittersweet memories of departing my hometown for the first time, leaving for my freshman year of college. But the next time I’ll return to Virginia Tech after this spring, I’ll be an alumna… which is a word that doesn’t sound real to me at all.
I take change hard. I’m very rooted in my own version of reality, with my feet firmly planted wherever I am. Some people love the thrill of migrating from place to place — uprooting every year wherever the wind takes them. I’ve never been able to understand that. I like to think I have an adventurous soul, a spirit prone to wandering, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I don’t. I’m far too comfortable in my own little snowglobe of a world, and when time threatens to transform the way it looks, I feel paralyzed by anxiety. Why can’t we just stay? Why can’t I be twenty-one, filling my apartment bedroom with rows of massive houseplants, writing poems in the margins of my notebooks forever? After this, it’s work… without the protection of professors, classmates and college life. I’m invested in what I know, and absolutely terrified of what I do not.
I began my freshman year of college wide-eyed, enthusiastic and breathlessly impressed by independence. It was as if the confines of high school had shattered overnight. I could breathe. I could go for runs wherever and whenever I wanted, share sandwiches under campus trees with new friends, date the wrong (and right) people, and reinvent myself into someone more cultured than the person I left behind. It was easy to fall in love with Virginia Tech — the Saturday morning farmers markets, dangling my feet over the Pylons on a windy day, walking downtown and buying myself coffee just because. Blacksburg embraced who I was, and wrapped me up in its beauty. It gave me a sense of belonging I didn’t know existed before arriving. It’s silly, but it hardly ever occurred to me that I’d have to leave. At least, not then.
Since those golden days, it feels as though I’ve tried on at least a hundred different versions of myself. I played the cards. I fell in love and out of it and back in again. I was wrong and right and wild and calm and naive. I learned how to cook delicious meals (though some attempts have faltered), how to share a cozy house with other people, how to garden, how to throw a wicked Friday night get-together, how to write stuff that haunts, how to be kinder to myself. If high school Michelle were to meet the person she is now, I have a feeling she’d be delighted.
I’m trying not to dwell on the where-I’m-going part. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think it matters as much as this world tries to convince us it does. The winds will carry me wherever they feel like taking me, wherever I feel like steering. In three years, I met my soul sisters. I met the person I can see as the forever love of my life. I learned how to talk to mountains and navigate the quiet neighborhoods of this tiny town and give presentations on classical literature. I learned how to be happy without the assistance of anything other than the music in my chest.
I love you, Virginia Tech.
Maybe I’ll write a book about you. Maybe I won’t.
But I do know one thing: I’ll keep telling the story of us, no matter how far I stray.
