Four years ago this Friday I crossed the Key Bridge in a taxi, all my belongings in the trunk and my mother beside me for moral support, by which I mean extra carrying capacity. It was a beautiful day, the early-morning sunshine reflecting off of the blue and silver balloons tied to the bridge, the Potomac flowing below us in an appropriately stately way and the 95-percent humidity that normally characterizes such August mornings in our nation’s fair capital gloriously absent. In point of fact, it was an ideal day to begin college, not that I noticed. I was otherwise occupied making an exhaustive list of all the ills that were sure to befall me in the course of my almost-started first year of college.
What if my roommate steals all of my sweaters and clips her toenails in my bed? What if the cafeteria food is so bad that I develop scurvy and tapeworm and anemia? What if someone leaves a Hot Pot on by accident when making Ramen noodles and burns the dorm down? What if everyone on my floor is a Dave Matthews fan and I have to listen to “So Much to Say” or, God forbid, “What Would You Say” all the time? (Sidenote: this actually turned out to be closer to the truth than I had feared) What if nobody likes me, everybody hates me and I have to go eat worms?
My mother patted my hand in the taxi and said, “Isn’t this exciting?”
Orientation weekend ended, my mother left, and I braced myself to live the life of peril I had predicted. Days passed, weeks passed and I waited for the ax to fall, although I was especially vigilant about unplugging Hot Pots, my own and those of others. Life resettled into a new and not-uncomfortable pattern, and none of my imagined fears came to pass.
Of course, I didn’t ask myself the what-ifs that really snuck up to smack me in the face during my first year: What if my allergy to vacuuming and poor aim when throwing away my dental floss drive my roommate up a wall? What if I fall madly in love with the boy down the hall and he turns out to be gay? What if I begin every single one of my class papers at 2 a.m. at the earliest and begin to hallucinate from sustained lack of sleep? What if I wildly exceed my budget and have to get a job? What if my irrational fear of no one liking me makes me kind of annoying to be around?
If I’d had half a brain that morning I would have realized that I was worried about entirely the wrong things?i.e., everyone else, instead of myself. But that thought never even entered my head as I sat in the cab in morning traffic on the Key Bridge four years ago, staring in only partially-disguised horror at the approaching spires of Healy Tower, and, in retrospect, it’s probably better that they didn’t. It allowed me to smugly cross Key Bridge in the rain last week, gazing out onto the temperamental waters of the Potomac and the highly un-ballooned Key Bridge, thinking about how far I had come since my first days of school before turning my attention to other, more pressing issues.
What if my housemates refuse to pay the rent and perform human sacrifice in the living room? What if someone breaks into our house and steals all of our furniture and burns the house down and we have to live like nomads, roaming through Burleith with begging bowls? What if my insufferably high opinion of myself causes everyone to hate me ….
