Long post, short video.
Length: 1:02
Flashless? (
Click to view.)
When I arrived at Northwestern University in the fall of 1986, I was in a place of intense grief. I had left behind a community of close high school friends (and a girlfriend) back in California, and was more invested in maintaining those relationships than in creating new ones. And of course I was entering a place (college) where all my freshman peers were bouncing off the walls with excitement at their new found independence from their families, their towns, their high schools, everything associated with home.
All except one.
Just a few doors down the hall from me was a girl named Laura Allen, from Oak Park, Illinois. She was also having trouble detaching from her close-knit circle of friends back home. Some were still in Oak Park, and several had headed to school up in Madison, so they were occasionally accessible on weekends. But in the rhythm of day-to-day life it was still too far away.
Laura and I found each other pretty quickly, and we would stay up late together swapping stories of our crazy friends, and showing each other photo albums of high school memories. We also hung out, shared meals, and spent time exploring the campus and town together. Our intimacy was intense, but it wasn't romantic, or sexual (Laura was starting to date, and I was still preposterously attached to my girlfriend back home). We clung to each other I think because when we were around each other we could be homesick. In other social settings you had to put on a good face, pretend you wouldn't rather be someplace else (and with somebody else). Other people asked you to live in the present.Together Laura and I let each other live in our separate pasts.
As I was editing this segment together late that fall, I was struck at how I had failed to record any hint of our actual relationship (I didn't realize at the time that its hidden-ness was part of its function). As I showed these brief video moments to my family and friends back home, I had to work to explain how important Laura had been to me, to THEM. Because in the footage there's no evidence.
Looking back, I can still identify my friendship with Laura as one of the most significant of my time in college, and yet after that first quarter we drifted quickly apart. When we got back to school after Christmas break, something unspoken had changed between us. Of course what had happened is that over the break each of us had experienced collisions both large and small between our expectations of home and the realities of it. So that as we returned, our shared homesickness habit was less able to deliver the fix it had the quarter before. And in clinging to each other a little less, we were each free to find a few more things about the new place that could help get us interested in the present (and ultimately the future). In a way I needed to let go of Laura like I needed to let go of home.
Labels: 1986, CHMaC
