The Long Amtrak Back

Thoughts on visiting your college town for the first time as an alum and the improbable fact that sometimes we get closure. But only when we no longer need it.

In certain segments of this country, there exists a particular vocabulary for the changing of the seasons. These locales, which every year grow smaller and more dull, attract leaf-peepers, in pursuit of “peak” foliage. When the leaves will “peak” is treated with serious speculation and science. I understand this obsession. In Vermont, where I went to school, the colors of the leaves were so brilliant as to fashion as aesthete from even the most committed cynic. In fall, the cycle of these leaves is comfort, a reminder of time passed. The window between summer and winter grows slimmer as the leaf-peeper moves southward; leaves wither and flake away as husks. A winter stripped of color. Not so in New England. Or, at least, not yet. There are still the old comforts: cheerful sweaters, spiced apple cider donuts, the first morning of crisp air, and the mountains of red and gold.

I visited my alma mater a weekend before the foliage’s peak. Bad speculating maybe, or a protection. It is more difficult to turn a back on so much loveliness. I had planned the visit with a mind for fall. Vermont is beautiful in all seasons, but, to this urbanite, October, is the most otherworldly. I knew it would be my last visit for the foreseeable future. My senior year, we greeted the returning alums with a light mockery that was underscored by the fear of our own futures; without return offers, without jobs, we were anxious about our peaks. Now, on the other side, I can recognize our scorn for desperate self-protection. Still, there are only so many times one can hope to dip into the well of the past before the water turns bitter. People asked if it was strange to be back and I said no. I entered campus at nine and walking through the green (so quiet on a Friday night, had it always been that way?) was a tour of a dearly beloved landmark: no longer home. I was in town for three days and four nights, a long weekend organized around a coffee chat with my former advisor in who I hoped to find not approval, but solace for the writer’s road I had decided to embark on. The running joke was that there is no department so happy to see their graduates go to find work as bartenders and waitresses as the Creative Writing department.

I drifted through campus with an unfamiliar serenity. On Saturday night I dropped by what in Middlebury is considered a party, twenty or so people dancing in a basement while, upstairs, students cluster on couches. As if from a distance, I watched myself chat with a boy with whom I once entertained an unserious, mutually ambivalent flirtation. We talked about The Marriage Plot. He compared himself to the heroine’s depressed boyfriend, Leonard, and asked me if there was anyone in the novel I related to. I considered the question. The obvious answer, of course, was Madeliene, the English major who wonders if there is still room to examine marriage plot novels (James, Austen, Wharton, and Eliot) in Derrida’s heyday. But Madeliene spends the majority of the novel tending to her Leonard in a lonely, Cape mansion while she applies for a PhD in Victorian Lit, and, even at sixteen, I did not find in her a model for my ambitions. I can’t remember what I came up with. But I left this so-called party, placid and pitying the boy with vomit on his breath. Five months ago, I would have left a similar party an hour later, beating on myself for not seizing whatever dubious opportunity attracted my attention. How grateful was the graduate!

I felt this calmness again on Sunday morning as I watched runners pant by, and, as I sliced into my dining hall French Toast because Sunday was no longer sacrificed to homework. At college, I performed what now, in retrospect, strikes me as a singularly athletic balancing act. I was always busy—busy with class and extracurriculars, but mostly with the two poles of my college life: work and friends. If I wasn’t toiling in the library I was at one of my meticulously planned meals or “partying.” In my senior year, I usually binge-drank three nights a week (the weekend started at the Bar Night pregame) without letting my grades waver. How did I do it or, perhaps the better question, why? The obvious answer is a social neuroticism that could only be fostered in the punishing social cauldron of COVID-19 college. And, also, fun. Less than the parties themselves I remember my friends—dancing, deliberating outfits with the seriousness of judicial proceedings, adjusting eyeliner, throwing down shots until we got too old, parsing texts and planning grand campaigns, and laughing and laughing and laughing. I remember those dining hall brunches with the nostalgia reserved for ordinary pleasures we take for granted until they’re gone forever. So, how did I do it? Balance work and play. There’s always a trade-off and in my case, it was sleep but this is not an unwelcome casualty for the college student. Sleep, TV, and dating. “And you regretted that,” A friend reminded me, in reference to my very public op-ed about being single throughout college. The question left me with a queasy feeling. Because that sacrifice wasn’t of my own volition. I am not so strong that if presented with the opportunity for love, or its various permutations, I would raise a hand and say, “No. Homework,” or, “No. My friends need me.” If the choice was mine, I would have sacrificed friends and work for the prospect of love, however much of a shadow. I was pondering this all as I crossed the old threshold of my advisor’s office.

Immediately, my mood brightened. His dog leaped on me, and I remembered how many times I sat in the same chair, hoping the sweet dog’s hair wouldn’t stick to my clothes. We launched into talk of my novel, my plan to live as a writer. Did I regret not dating? So many of my Saturday nights were spent wondering if I would find love in college like that was the sum total of my education. Once, a young woman, who I tried to take for an oracle, told me I would find love because I had known the other side: the heartbreak, the desolation. But that’s not how the math worked out. Instead, I wrote a novel, revised it twice, and then, this summer revised it again. I don’t think I would have been able to write a novel with the same diligence if I were in a relationship. Since graduating, I’ve been exposed to tremendous amounts of monogamy. Love is gorgeous and genuinely transcendent, and yet most young, heterosexual relationships follow that same script. Woman as interpreter, soother of male ills. Or, as the Anne Carson poem goes, “Well, he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out.” It’s not about ideology; ideology rarely stands a chance against desire. It’s been many, many years since I was in a relationship, but I’ve observed this impulse in myself in smaller ways and I still regard my high school—where briefly became hysterical, nag, emotional punching bag, etc.—with deep horror. A novel, even a bad one, is a demanding master. It requires at least devotion and, hopefully, a surrender of the unconscious. The goal is for it to work on you when you’re sleeping. The goal is for it to consume you. At the beginning of my senior year, my heart was flung about and, while I waited to see where it would land, I tried to write a poem. The words didn’t come. Then, the shock of pain and, also, relief: I wrote the poem quickly and easily.

Novels are selfish in other ways. Once, I experienced an existential crisis that was as absurd as it was deeply felt. I was in a fiction workshop and had written a story that betrayed someone who was, mostly unintentionally, quite cruel to me. The story was not autofiction, nor written with the intent to revenge or defame. I don’t think anyone in the twelve-person workshop would have connected the character to a real, walking person on our campus, much less identify the intimacy I betrayed. And, yet I felt I was at a moral crossing. In my ethic, it was alright to strip off my skin for the class’s judgment; it was another thing to strip the skin from someone who hadn’t consented. I pushed the story by a week and, after a talk with my advisor and many stomachaches, submitted it. This was not an especially good story but it was significant. In sharing the story, I established the first stake of my writer’s ethic which is distinct from my lover’s ethic. This story was also the seed for the novel I submitted as my senior thesis. Most of the original story is erased and expanded. That same betrayed intimacy remains. Dispassionately, I judged it good material and judge it as such still.

I don’t know if I had the self-control to raise a hand to the hope of love and say, “No. My novel needs me.” Probably not. The skill of sticking to the cold desk, which will never love you back, is a denial of self-pleasure it takes writers many years to master. Even if some of it was boring, miserable, exhausting, the twenty-two-year-old me is glad for every hour submitted to the desk.

“No,” I thought as surveyed the brilliant books in my advisor’s office. “No, I wouldn’t change it.”  

It’s specious to imply love in the novelist is opposed to the novel. Sally Rooney has gone on record in multiple interviews that falling in love with her husband was essential to writing good fiction (Can this young writer imagine a more romantic sentiment?) and plenty of successful writers, even women writers, are happily married. My education in novels taught me there is no one way to be a novelist and yet there are some constants. Work, discipline, independence, resilience, tolerance for loneliness, and an almost absurd ability to withstand rejection and failure. I can’t imagine myself developing these same traits if I hadn’t spent so many years lonely and failing and writing. In other words, good material.

My last night on campus indulged the sentimental. I arrived at college in the fall of 2020 and, to get much-needed air, I would walk down the hill from my dorm room to the athletic center and back. Often, I was calling my mother, crying, or both. That night, I looked up at the sky and made that walk one last time. There is an enormous comfort to the urbanite; I don’t know if I ever saw stars like that before I went out to Vermont. Students pushed by me, weighed down by their backpacks and whatever demons they hoped to work out on the treadmill. Many things stressed me out in college—Would I ever find love? Was my roommate mad at me? Was I mad at her? Why wasn’t I invited to dinner, or the swimming hole? Had I said something stupid? Did I get too drunk last night? Would I get this draft right? – and my academic work was usually the least among them. I found it challenging, but also, at a fundamental level, soothing. If I put in the hours, I would get the grade I wanted and I always put in the hours. How many of life’s objectives are so easily satisfied?

As a graduate, most of those old social and romantic worries are eroded by the big one. How to make a living as a writer: Do I have what it takes to endure hardship, rejection, and crippling self-doubt? Can I step out from the bourgeoisie comforts, what my advisor called “the straight path,” to which my classmates and I were equally reared? Is my imagination robust enough? Will I write another novel? Will I write a better novel? Will I ever publish a novel? These questions are more difficult to answer than those on my Shakespeare final, but are, to me, more worthwhile. Like many high-achieving college students, I spent the formative years of my education preparing for my future. First, as a high school student, hoping to be admitted to an elite college, and then as an elite college student, hoping to be admitted into an elite future. I am still trying to unlearn this tendency of thinking ten, or twenty years ahead because, like getting a glimpse into your future, the act of predicting, of knowing, changes the outcome. In the months since graduating, I felt the tautness of so many worries leave my body. I don’t think I’m less of a neurotic person, but the anxiety is localized. I’m trying to let life happen to me. To be young and stupid so long as I keep writing. To no longer feel like a student, anxious for evaluation.

When I returned to the city, the air was crisp, and the leaves had begun to turn. Time to move, time to change again. I smiled.