The Struggle of Moving on

All my life I have moved on, from house to house, city to city, even country to country. There is something about New York however that has a hold on me. How can I move on from a city where I feel I belong, become who I am, and make a community for myself? I think many seniors may have the same thought, and who aren’t sure where they’re going. Many will stay in the city but I’m sure others, just like me, are thinking of moving on not only to another city but also to another phase of life. How can we cope with creating a whole new life, the struggle of beginning again? I want to explain first why I love New York but also the reason I’m leaving and how to deal with the complex feelings of this choice.

New York is where I learned to become myself, my first adult home. When I packed the car for the first time to drive eight hours to my dorm I could never have imagined my life would end up here. I have learned more about myself than I ever could if I had stayed at home. Recently a freshman asked me if it gets better and I had to stop and think. My sophomore year was truly one of my worst but it led to so much growth. Junior year as well as senior year have been some of the best of my life. I have accomplished so many goals, made several groups of friends, and came out to truly exist as I wanted to in life. I have been lucky enough to study in Ireland, visit six other countries, see every borough, experience every season, and live three wonderful years in this city. This is what makes it hard to move on, I built a life here and now I’m actively choosing to leave.

Many people may wonder why I want to leave something that sounds so amazing. A large reason is sadly affordability, the city and grad school are expensive and NYC makes it hard to keep up. I also tend to move on to new places after large life events. I went to grade school in one school, middle school somewhere else, and high school in three different places. When I studied abroad in high school as soon as I got home I decided I needed to move far away for college. All of these places changed me, and I think moving from state to state created a lot of who I am. I am more confident and outgoing something I never was before I came to the city. I think because of this if I move to another new city I will continue to evolve into this newer more confident person.

Despite wanting to move on this is the hardest decision I think I’ve ever made. I have a lot of experience with this and can offer some tips to everyone who has complicated feelings about moving on. The hardest struggle I’ve had with all these transfers is making friends. While it took me many years to learn how to approach and interact with people when I moved I eventually gained the confidence needed to succeed. The biggest hurdle was simply talking to people, being the first one to put yourself out there is important. It led to me gaining a genuine friend group full of people I love and care about. The other issue was always adapting to where I am at the moment. I have become a person who loves seeing all the cool and exciting things a place has to offer and will make lists and itineraries of where to go and what to do. Becoming a planner is the best thing I could have done not only for the university but also for adapting and discovering the world around me.

I will always grieve leaving the city and the struggles I may face in a new place are daunting. The life I have now is sure to change and evolve and it is a struggle having to go along with it. Yet this struggle also brings the freedom of never being tied down, feeling free. I will always want to explore the path ahead of me to become who I was meant to be. This means grieving where I left off and struggling to move on, as well as joyfully choosing a new journey in life.

Written by Kat Reed

How to live through the cold

A part of me dies in New York when I can no longer leave the house without a jacket.

Suddenly I am an insecure thirteen-year-old afraid to show her arms, only now there is no one there to remind me to grab a jacket. I must remember, I must prepare, I must know how to live through the cold, or I will never make it through the year; I will never make it through the grief that is getting older and getting colder.

Something changes after the warmth of summer fades, something sets in, like a call to action, to change or be changed.

I find myself mourning everyone and everything as if this season is its own wake. I consider myself a cheerful person, I love the holiday season, and reasons to dress up. But the three weeks until I return home feels like a lifetime.

My friend, Adam, moved from Michigan and was an engineering major for approximately three semesters.

I knew Adam for a month before he moved out of the city; he looked like a kid who knew how to be alone. I used to envy how he was unafraid to go on the metro or smoke outside the CVS on Fulton, so when we had his going away party I was surprised. I asked him why he was leaving, and he couldn't give me a good answer, all he said was “It was colder than I thought it would be.” this is the same answer he gave me when I saw him light up for the first time and asked him why he did it.

I have still never smoked a cigarette, for I am fearful it will make me want to flee New York.

I didn't expect myself to grieve growing up as much as I have. That change and loss are all part of the deal. I suppose this is obvious, but one day you're dreaming about what the future will look like, and another, you're in it, and you have to let it be what it is. Maybe that sounds silly.

I used to think grief only happened when someone died, that it was conformed to death, and so whatever I was feeling had to be something different. Then I found a picture of a girl I knew in elementary school. We went to the water park together, and it hit me that I would never see her again, and if I did, on the street somewhere or at the grocery store, would I be able to recognize her, would she to me? I knew the answer, I still know the answer.

I decided there must be a name for this, and it must've been grief, because the next morning I went to the corner store and forgot my jacket, and for the first time in a long time, it was freezing. I cried over orange juice on my way home and got so angry because I meant to get milk, and cried again because I should have brought a jacket, and cried even longer because I couldn't remember what waterpark we went to.

This had to be grief, because otherwise it meant I was going insane, and I had no time to do that because finals were a week from now and I couldn't go crazy and have time to study for second-semester Mathematics.

Once, I spent a whole day between the oven and the kitchen table trying to balance studying for finals and making my mother's chicken soup, and no matter how hard I tried, something was wrong. I don't know exactly why I didn't just call her; some days, I think I would rather freeze than admit I don't know what I'm doing, and I’d rather be alone than admit I need people.

After tears and a lot of burnt vegetables, I decided I would walk outside and try to remember why I was in a different city, without my mother's soup, and with one too many lingering questions on how to live anyway.

A block in, I was shivering, and New York lived on.

This is where I've learned that the secret to survival, is to let yourself be needed and let yourself need.

Otherwise, you will not make it through the winter.

I want so badly to be the girl I used to be in the place I am now, but it’s impossible; one could not have existed without the preface of grief foreshadowing; I couldn’t have made it here without laying to rest a part of who I used to be.

So, I walked home and called my mom. My soup was missing celery, and before I left the house to grab the final ingredient and try again, I grabbed my coat.

When I wonder what it takes to live in a new city, go to a new school, and live a new life, I have to remind myself I'm not borrowing somebody else's, that I am, in fact, not a visitor to my life, that once the winter passes, I will still be here, as long as I let myself be.

I put on re-runs of Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Meals and pretend I'm not afraid of growing old.

My brother will visit, and he will be taller than I remember. This is grief, hundreds of miles away.

I try to reconcile with the fact that I am not fifteen anymore, and I have to let myself belong in the world instead of being afraid of it the way I used to be. This is grief next to you calling to you, asking you to bury the dead, but still, please visit often.

if you want to know how to live through the cold, call your mother, grieve your younger self, and remember your jacket.

A Boston Love Survey

Written and Photographed by Anna Albrecht

As I opened a document to begin this piece, a young woman, seemingly my age, asked to come stand in the sun at the picnic table I was seated at. She puts on a cream-colored sweater and pulls out a book but does not sit. She stands and reads in front of me. Two people have passed in the time I’ve written these sentences with film cameras, taking pictures of the eighteen-story high Computing and Data Science building – the favorite child of Boston University’s campaign team. Shortly after, another young woman with glasses and a flannel approaches me, asking if I would be willing to answer a few questions. I agree and take what she titles “The Love Survey.” She asks me what I define love as, and I tell her I believe love to be the commitment to making time and space for something or someone.

“There’s an element of sacrifice to love,” she adds.

She is right, and then she asks when the last time I felt that love was.

The time is now. This is a love story, and so it is a story about sacrifice.

Though I’d been committed to Boston University since April, the impending move-in day still felt like a fake story I was telling my friends and family to manifest my acceptance into the school. For the past year, I had been dying to be a part of this community, this world. Now, it was opening in front of my eyes like a bright summer blossom, and I was watching it on a silver screen instead of processing the velocity at which this reality was launching itself at me. Texas summer lingered slowly, burning its touch into my cheeks on my final days at home, much to my objection. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of San Antonio, to never feel its traces in my mannerisms or voice or the clothes I wore. My goal was to shock the people I met when I mentioned where I was from.

Walking into the airport with six suitcases filled to the weight limit with my belongings reminded me that I wasn’t truly leaving anything behind. In the check-in line, I ran into two people from my high school headed to Boston on the same flight as me, a coincidence that can only be credited to Boston’s inevitable ability to make a major metropolitan city feel like the tiniest hometown – I learned that about Boston the second I committed to BU. Somehow, a place filled with colleges newspapers, and major corporations felt like a special social club. In the months leading up to my move, it felt like I was being slowly welcomed into a community that disguised itself as a city. The world’s biggest college town. People talk about Boston as if it is a mutual old friend.

I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but on the plane ride over, wheels parting from the ground like a final kiss goodbye, I couldn’t help but feel the sweetness and sadness that come with leaving home. Everything I knew was in Texas, I had been there for 18 years, and now I was being flown into a future I wasn’t sure of, a city that belonged to so many people and felt like a friend – what if there wasn’t a place for me? Whose instincts could I trust and how could I rely on my own when I was completely out of my league when I knew how to say “yes ma’am, no sir” but not how to ride the train? Who was I to decide that I could be a part of Boston? The wheels touched down. The air was already cooler than home, the sun a little softer.

Boston felt ready to accept my uncertainty like the whole city was looking on with gentle eyes into a world I didn’t know of.

By the time I moved in, Lily, my roommate, had already spent two nights in our sweet little dorm. We called it the itty bitty dreamhouse and that didn’t make it a dream come true but it made it a place where they could exist, swell, and sway in the air of our disco ball lights and flower bouquets. But the dorm started empty on my side, barren and a little scary. There was nothing there that reminded me of home on our first night, except for the sky. I wasn’t afraid like I thought I would be of being alone that first night because of the consistency in the sky. The same moon rose on the same pretty night, consistent also with the heat that drove everyone crazy. In my first 24 hours, it felt like I met a million people. The first night was spent discussing ice cream and smoke shops movies and frat houses. We dealt cards on the floor of our common room and took pictures on cameras, not sure if we would remember the faces that sat in our SD cards in a week, but we remembered them then, we knew each other that night.

As the weeks went on, classes started and my parents left, but it all made Boston feel more like home, or at least a place I was used to living in. There was very little choice but to live in it – Boston was a place that made me feel sometimes like the only girl in the world, and sometimes like I was on a movie set of a city that didn’t change by any of my action, glancing for a moment in my direction before continuing with the regular programming. Texas was easy to lose yourself in, and easy to fade into. Most people I know did. Boston felt like the lights were always shining on you, but simultaneously everyone around, everyone arriving and leaving alike. I suddenly became aware of how out of order I was. I didn’t know what neighborhoods were fun, what restaurants to eat at, what to say, or how to say it. I didn’t know how to dress in the mornings because I had never lived somewhere where the weather changed with the sun. How was this the same sun I had always known? I didn’t even know what I was supposed to know or not know. So the first opportunity I got, I decided that I would figure Boston out, just to know I could.

On my first outing alone, I went to the Thinking Cup coffee shop on Newbury Street, a thirty-minute walk from my campus that everyone refused to call a campus. I thought it would be sunny, but storm clouds started to roll in. Walking seemed the scenic option; I called my mom for company. When I got to the coffee shop – a coffee shop exactly the way a coffee shop should be, with little brown seats and booths, steps down to a lower level lit by soft warm chandeliers, vintage and smelling of sweet coffee steam – I ordered a chai latte and put way too much cinnamon on top. Damp from the rain and a little embarrassed, I set my cinnamon with a side of chai mug on a table for two. I hadn’t been in Boston long enough to fill even a table for two, but the vacancy immediately filled me with the hope that eventually it would be, that I may have to move to the other section of the Thinking Cup to accommodate chairs for more guests. Everything became more approachable. In this big college town of a city, I walked around the coffee shop and sat down like that was just something I did. I, from the city where the Alamo is, never experienced a September under 90 degrees until today, this was just something I did. It could be now.

I walked to the coffee shop just to know I could do it. I took the train home just so I knew I could. I couldn’t tell you if this feeling would stick forever but it was true in this moment - I was in Boston and I could walk to a coffee shop and take the train home. For the moment I hadn’t left behind the wildflowers that grew on the side of a Texas highway or the grassy stretch of field that sat behind my high school, for the moment I was a part of Boston’s production.

It rained a lot in the first few weeks I was here. But it was a good rain, a rain promising a warm and sunny next few days. This was something I knew, it was something familiar, and as I walked through Fenway with my roommate, lamenting over the extra fan we could not find, I felt the sun burn into my cheeks just as it had before I left. It felt like a blessing, like a promise held between pinkies. I had sacrificed the comfort of knowing and familiarity, of driving a car and wearing shorts all year round, of barbeque, humid nights, and a setting sun so clearly seen giving way to a starry sky, but I still had a sun that burned and kissed. I had books to read and movies to watch and love to be spent and gained and built. I loved Texas, in all years I had spent detesting it because I could sacrifice it. I could take what it had given me, even if I couldn’t identify it, and bring it to a city that loved me either way and would sacrifice for me in its way.

Perhaps the only real home we have is within ourselves. With that comes the responsibility to upkeep it, to tidy it when necessary, but to understand that it can change and grow and open like a bright summer flower in a way that allows nothing else to impede but what we allow. I still don’t know what a winter looks like, or a Red Sox game, or a lobster roll, but I know I am in love with Boston. Certainty is sacrificed in the name of possibility, and I can feel Boston love me back.

Written and Photographed by Anna Albrecht